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BELL LABS sets up a workshop on “Producing invention: Inventory of multidisciplinary research.” For how did the Edison teams, gathered in Menlo Park, invent the light bulb? How did John Wild and his team have made progress in research on medical imaging, thus laying the foundations for the ultrasound? Finally, were Dan Bricklin and Robert Frankston really lonely researchers, who invented the spreadsheet with Visicalc for Apple II?
Multidisciplinarity is seen as a way to properly understand the user dimension in research. This finding has led Bell Labs to set up research teams gathering researchers in computer science, design, psychology, ergonomics and sociology. But if the theoretical work on the representation of the user as a means to ensure the success of innovations is widely distributed, what happens in the multidisciplinary inventive process, which in the case of Bell Labs (research center whose productions, scientific facts and inventions, nourish innovation at Alcatel-Lucent) precedes innovation?
In the multidisciplinary research, did the inventor disappear, if he ever existed? If an invention is characterized by a publication, who, or rather what specialty, can we assign it to? Ultimately, is the multidisciplinary invention the juxtaposition of disciplinary inventions, or an achievement that has transcended disciplines?
The roundtable “What is the nature of the multidisciplinary invention?” will be hosted by Christophe Rebours and will gather Bruno Aidan (director of applications research, Bell Labs), Jean-François Bassereau (Research Director, RCP Design Global), Nicolas Nova (researcher at Liftlab) and Simon Richir (director of the virtual reality laboratory, ENSAM).
