Industry and commerce are more dynamic than ever, the rate of change is very high and most young people expect to change their occupation relatively frequently. Thus the skills acquired at university need to be readily transportable. Additionally, many modern industrial developments require interdisciplinary, teams of which an obvious example is the requirement for environmental considerations in design and applications. It would be most beneficial to develop a definition of transportable skills for which the criteria are wide applicability and relative invariance with time-they are fundamental. Mathematical skills must surely be the basis for such a definition but need to be set in an applied context.
Interdisciplinary education is a difficult topic.
In the past, the provision of courses outside the student's own discipline has been thought to provide some experience in this respect. However, one must query the efficiency of this since in the end it could lead to trivialization of topics and the education of generalists without sufficient depth of education in any one discipline. There may indeed be a place for this form of education but there is merit in attempting to analyze the skills required in interdisciplinary work-in which many academics are involved as consultants to the profession. We might, therefore, gain greatly from the considerable expertise and experience which some sectors of the profession have in this respect. Innovation is an elusive concept and much discussion has centered on whether it can be taught.