To get started with interdisciplinarity, ask: what’s the problem?

How can higher education bridge the gap between deep disciplinary identities and the need for societal engagement? Protecting academic rigour is important, but the latter will be crucial in tackling educational inequality and sustainability challenges. 

Interdisciplinary projects could be the key. However, initiatives like these usually remain temporary, driven by a few enthusiastic personalities. Alternatively, they sit on the periphery, struggling against the gravitational pull of traditional departments. 

Instead of tearing down the disciplinary silos that serve us well, let’s strategically expand our academic structures. We call it the “layering approach”. Rather than hoping that interdisciplinarity will flourish organically, universities can layer formal platforms, organised around societal challenges, atop their existing institutional structures.

At our university, we put this organisational innovation into practice in 2023. Rather than transforming our three traditional faculties, we introduced a structural innovation by layering two new entities alongside them: the Academy for Applied Policy Studies and Education Futures (AAPSEF) and the Academy for Educational Development and Innovation (AEDI). 

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The former focuses on applied policy studies and the future of education, translating interdisciplinary research into responses to emerging societal and policy challenges. In contrast, the latter focuses on educational development and innovation, bringing together university units and external partners to support new programmes, consultancy, professional learning, and school and community development. 

Our dual structure of faculties and academies allows us to maintain core disciplinary prestige, while pursuing cross-disciplinary societal engagement with real institutional backing.

Both academies act as cross-cutting platforms, bringing together centres working on policy, technology and educational innovation. Initially, they recruit academic members from existing departments. Gradually, the academies also recruit their full-time academic staff members using their own income, generated by master’s degree programme tuition fees, project grants and donations. Put simply: the goal is to connect research and teaching directly to pressing social needs.

The lesson is not that every university needs academies. It is that interdisciplinary work needs a visible mandate, a defined problem domain and a structure that connects departments rather than bypassing them.

If you’d like to do something similar in your own institution, here are three practical lessons we learned.

Start with the problem, not the department

Interdisciplinary structures work best when they are built around problems that matter beyond the university. Many social challenges cut across departmental lines, so existing academic boundaries cannot be the only way to organise new work.

The starting question should be simple: what problem are we trying to address and what expertise is needed? Once that is clear, structure can follow purpose rather than administrative units.

That was the logic behind our academy model. We did not ask which department should own interdisciplinary work. We identified areas that required sustained collaboration across policy, technology, pedagogy and professional practice. In this way, the societal challenge became the basis for organisational design.

Give interdisciplinary work a formal home

It’s common for universities to praise interdisciplinarity, while treating it as an administrative afterthought. Leaders often tell staff to collaborate, but then evaluate them using promotion criteria and budgeting models that are still stuck in conventional disciplinary silos. Under those conditions, cross-departmental work only happens when people volunteer their free time – and people eventually burn out. 

Creating a formal, faculty-level platform changes everything. It has a recognised place in the university’s architecture. Staff working across departments no longer have to negotiate between competing faculty structures to get things done.

At my university, visible commitment of senior leadership made a huge difference. President John Chi-Kin Lee stepped in to serve as the initiator and director of both academies. That sent a clear signal across campus that this was an institutionally backed strategic expansion, not a side project.

Make the structure visible through programmes and centres

If you add a new structural layer, you have to prove it’s not just a symbolic umbrella, but show real academic and external outcomes. The best way to do that is to tie the new structure directly to taught programmes, research centres and partnership platforms.

When you offer portfolios like that, the organisational change becomes real. Students can enrol in programmes that didn’t exist under the old structure. Staff see their cross-departmental work recognised. Partners know exactly what they’re signing up to.

Research centres are just as important. We set up the Global Research Institute for Finnish, European and Global South Education (GRIFE) under the Academy for Educational Development and Innovation, for example. It brings together several areas of education, such as comparative education, STEM, teacher education and digital competence into a single platform, pulling members from multiple departments and international partners. 

Meanwhile, the Future Team, under the Academy for Applied Policy Studies and Educational Futures, connects emerging technologies with teaching and talent development across education, health and the humanities.

What to watch out for

Adding new structural layers isn’t automatically successful. Three risks require careful attention:

• Misaligned incentives: Don’t create an interdisciplinary showcase without addressing reward systems. If staff are promoted solely for traditional outputs, the new structure will struggle.
• Lack of operational focus: Avoid using broad themes without establishing clear boundaries. A challenge-led academy still requires a defined remit.
• Structural isolation: Don’t allow the new unit to detach from the rest of the university. Its primary purpose is to connect existing departments, not to compete with them.

We can resolve the tension between disciplinary depth and societal engagement when interdisciplinarity is formally built into the organisation. Layering new structures alongside existing faculties can make cross-boundary collaboration easier to organise, resource and sustain. 

Yuzhuo Cai is professor of the department of education policy and leadership and co-director of the Global Research Institute for Finnish, European and Global South Education at the Education University of Hong Kong.

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