Interdisciplinary community building : how is a community to be built in an interdisciplinary technology area?

Abstract

The value of interdisciplinary communities has been the focus of various research activities in recent years as many successful examples were put into practice at the same time. In those instances, continuous improvement of the community's activities could be noted. Actively building a new community on a specific topic on behalf of Austrian industry associations in a particular research field includes many challenges and issues to be faced. Participants from different disciplines usually have different goals, strategies, methods, structures, communication behaviors, agendas et cetera. The object of this thesis is to design a "prolific playground"- a systematic, productive and sustainable collaboration between cross-industrial development areas in order to generate interdisciplinary projects. These ventures will then aim for a positive impact on the progress of the community, the society and the development process of the participants. Therefore many issues had to be considered. The first step of this thesis was to define the perceptions of "interdisciplinary", "community", and "technology research area", to be able to work on these issues with a common understanding. After that, based on the existing body ofliterature, a theoretical description is provided that includes critical issues, bottlenecks, and other considerable aspects associated with designing such a community structure. To put the aforementioned theoretical aspects into a practical context, the community this thesis actually tried to optimize, is the Austrian "smart-textiles PLATTFORM". To this end the company in charge of the community was described, it's competences, its experiences in research and development over the years before, and it's goals and strategies at the time. Together with that, the current situation of the platform was analyzed by taking a closer look at its strengths and weaknesses as well as the corresponding opportunities and threats. This also connected to the present situation in the various target markets of this community, and the particular conditions of the involved branches. Based on these investigations, features and the according incentive systems for the inter-disciplinary community model was pointed out in the case of the "smart-textiles PLATT-FORM." To round off the thesis, potential risks of acceptance barriers, which have to be considered, were recorded. In a last step, the future development of the community is suggested.<br />