Scientific convergence: dealing with the elephant in the room.

B innovations in science often require more than just interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather, they rely on the convergence of different tools, skill sets, knowledge, and problem solving approaches from complementary disciples to explore new areas of science. Like the parable of the blind men and the elephant, scientists independently working in individual domains are each unable to see the full underlying nature and implications of a problem (isolated view, Figure 1a). Those who get input from or provide output to colleagues in other domains have a better but still limited understanding (coordinated view, Figure 1b), while those who wholly collaborate with colleagues and take collective action toward discovery have the best understanding of the problem’s nature and complexities (convergent view, Figure 1c). We argue that decision-analytic techniques like multicriteria decision analysis which provide a mathematical approach to problem decomposition and preference ranking can enable funding and academic institutions to more effectively promote convergence using the action alternatives available to them and fuel technology innovation. Convergence has been used to describe a growing need for collaboration between different fields of inquiry to foster innovation on inherently interdisciplinary problems of increasing complexity. The National Science Foundation (NSF) has acknowledged the importance of these efforts and has made recommendations to promote convergence, particularly among areas of research where nanotechnology can play a meaningful role. The National Academy of Science (NAS) has made sustained efforts to promote convergence as well, for example, within the natural sciences, and recently issued a report evaluating key challenge areas for convergence and provide practical recommendations to institutions. Two widely used institutional approaches to promote convergence, which are recommended in the NAS report include organizing scientists into committees and working groups, and colocating scientists from different disciplines to achieve innovations. The National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI, www.nano.gov), a pioneering application of convergence within the government, is comprised of representatives from a variety of federal organizations (NIH, DOD, DOE, FDA, etc.) responsible for nanotechnology research and development, and regulation. The NNI provides a forum for coordinating funding priorities across agencies and organizing working groups to develop recommended actions to address a host of interdisciplinary issues in the area of nanotechnology. While the structure of NNI is well-defined, the way in which individual member organizations provide recommendations and decide on how best to coordinate their individual actions could benefit from prescriptive guidance in service of achieving mutually beneficial and convergent outcomes. In another example, the MIT-Harvard Center of Cancer Nanotechnology Excellence, housed at the Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research (ki.mit.edu), promotes convergence by colocating scientists from different fields in the hopes of developing interdisciplinary solutions (e.g., cancer nanotherapies) through chance exposures to other researchers from other fields during the normal course of business. Researchers from complementary disciplines are sited strategically so they walk by each other to access shared resources (e.g., printers, lab space). Similar collaborative research facilities construct versatile working spaces to facilitate interaction between scientists and engineers with complementary research foci. This encourages scientists to be creative in connecting with others and move beyond the comfort zone of their limited disciplinary expertise. Both the composition of interagency committees and selection of scientists for centers were designed based on ad-hoc hypotheses on which disciplines would interface best with which others in the service of common goals. Although both NNI and the MIT-Harvard Center are examples of successful institutional actions that promote aspects of convergence and are consistent with NAS recommendations, we believe initiatives like these could benefit from a deliberate decision-analytic process to evaluate options for fostering convergence. These processes can help identify and encourage the right scientists from the right disciplines to take collective action toward solving complex interdisciplinary