I work in national defense. Believe me, it’s all of the above. You’ve said in 10,000 words what I practice every day. THE REALLY HARD PART IS FINDING SINGLE DISCIPLINARY PEOPLE WHO ARE OPEN ENOUGH AND CREATIVE ENOUGH TO _GET_ WHAT YOU PREACH TO THEM (or to help you get shit done). Your machine shop experience epitomizes this.

Second really hard part: the balancing act between learning skills to enhance what you do, and doing what you do. It’s too hard, as one example, to learn coding if you’ve NEVER DONE IT. It takes too much time from your interdisiplinary design (!) work. It’s also too hard to read Von Neumann if you need game theory. BUT YOU NEED TO. So, how can one build a HEALTHY tension between the two themes — doing, and learning to do? At my ripe old age (fifth decade — eat my dust), you are trying to accomplish faster and faster — and there never seems to be enough hours. I LONG for days when I said: “there’s nothing to do.” But I digress.

The best way I can put it: we (ID’ers…you know what that means) need to “set conditions” for later exploration or exploitation, rather than trying to achieve some effect. Going for an effect is meaningless in a world where context evolves at the rate of empirical scenarios fed by 24/7 media (press+web+communities). Setting conditions is the next skill to be mastered. I’m working on it.

(By the way, those captchas? Way too hard…)

I work in industry. I’m a chemist, but a work in a very un-chemocentric company. I benefit greatly from the fact that the engineering mindset that prevails here doesn’t generally understand what chemistry is, or does, only that it solves a lot of problems for engineers.

Solving problems that arise gives me a lot of space and freedom, credibility that the core (or corps) of chemistry people here have bought by inventing things and solving problems that are quite outside the largely electrical engineering worldview prevalent here.

Since chemistry is not defined at my work as exclusively ‘making molecules’ or ‘stirring things in flasks’ or ‘finding out what this material is’, I have had the great privilege of fiddling around with things outside my discipline, so much so that now, I can sit down with CAD tools and design parts, or put together circuits to do things. I am not, classically defined, a chemist any more. Chemistry informs and propels most of what I do, certainly. But I am freed to ignore a lot of boundaries. I am generally able to look at business and technical problems as opportunities to learn something new, then, with luck and work, to invent something new.

it counts for “more” on the resume than knitting together new practice communities, developing soft toolkits through your blog and sharing insights, ideas and work as it happens rather than 8 months later — that just doesn’t make sense. And most of it is perpetually locked away in institutional journals that no one without a university affiliation will likely ever, ever see. No wonder academics question their relevancy — their institutions are still in the 19th century.

In a few sentences, you sum up why I did not stay in academia. There are many more constraints imagined in industry than actually exist- if one can figure out how to pursue passions that will create value, there is a lot of freedom. It depends a lot on the culture of the firm. But the opportunity exists, and I think that based on the success I see where I am, this model of ‘un-disciplined’ innovation works well enough that I would not consider setting up a business any other way.