Abstract
This paper explores the extent to which companies’ R&D activities draw on multiple disciplines and the implications of interdisciplinarity for how companies organise their R&D activity. There is increasing awareness that fields beyond science and technology such as arts, humanities and social science (AHSS) can contribute to R&D activity, but these are difficult to measure, because AHSS R&D may take different organisational forms from conventional (science/technology) R&D, and may draw upon staff who are not ‘core’ R&D workers or are temporary workers or freelancers. Drawing upon recent developments in the literature on organisation of R&D as well as temporary organisations, we develop a conceptual framework to understand how interdisciplinarity may be related to temporary organisational structures. We present results of a survey of 303 R&D-intensive UK businesses who were asked about disciplinary orientation of their R&D and their R&D organisation. We find that 18% of firms in our sample using AHSS R&D, rising to 36% of creative industries firms. Econometric analysis shows that companies using AHSS for R&D are more likely to use freelancers as part of their R&D activity. We discuss the implications of these findings for our understanding of organisation of R&D.