iImproving Multidisciplinary Collaboration by Connecting Concepts in Different Domains

Social issues such as global warming and energy supply have become so com-pound and complex that they can not be solved by the contributions of a single discipline. Therefore, multidisciplinary collaborations, in which experts from different disciplines attack problems together from diverse expert perspectives, are expected to be needed. However, studies have reported that, in reality, experts often fail to sufficiently exploit their expertise. It is essential to exploit members ’ diverse expertise if multidisciplinary col-laborations are to be effective. Thus this research aims to promote exploita-tion of expertise so that multidisciplinary collaborations will produce better outcomes. Through literature study and empirical observations real multidisci-plinary collaborations, two challenges have been identified, as follows. Inactivation of idea generation based on expertise Human memory can be considered as a network structure in which associated concepts are closely connected to each other. When one part of memory is stim