Developing Interdisciplinary Understanding to Span Disciplinary and Organizational Boundaries

Based on a study of postgraduate students, we show how—through the processes associated with applying a strategic tool—students developed the understandings that allowed them to span disciplinary and organizational boundaries. We show how the students, working in teams and acting as consultants to industry clients, developed specific boundary-spanning skills that were learned through a combination of mimesis and reflection. In developing a course design that included four iterations of learning-by-observing, learning-by-doing, and learning-by-reflecting, we show how these insights add to pedagogic debates spanning interdisciplinary and inter-organizational learning challenges