Interdisciplinarity is widely considered necessary to solving many contemporary problems, and new funding structures and instruments have been created to encourage interdisciplinary research at universities. In this article, we study a small technical university specializing in green technology which implemented a strategy aimed at promoting and developing interdisciplinary collaboration. It did so by reallocating its internal research funds for at least five years to “research platforms” that required researchers from at least two of the three schools within the university to participate. Using data from semi-structured interviews from researchers in three of these platforms, we identify specific tensions that the strategy has generated in this case: (1) in the allocation of platform resources, (2) in the division of labor and disciplinary relations, (3) in choices over scientific output and academic careers. We further show how the particular platform format exacerbates the identified tensions in our case. We suggest that certain features of the current platform policy incentivize shallow interdisciplinary interactions, highlighting potential limits on the value of attempting to push for interdisciplinarity through internal funding.

跨学科性被广泛认为是解决许多当代问题所必需的，并且已经建立了新的资助结构和手段来鼓励大学中的跨学科研究。在本文中，我们研究了一家专门研究绿色技术的小型技术大学，该大学实施了旨在促进和发展跨学科合作的战略。为此，它至少将内部研究资金重新分配了5年用于“研究平台”，“研究平台”要求该大学三所学校中至少有两所的研究人员参与。利用来自其中三个平台的研究人员的半结构化访谈的数据，我们确定了这种情况下该策略所产生的特定紧张关系：（1）平台资源的分配，（2）在分工和学科关系方面，（3）在对科学产出和学术职业的选择上。我们还将进一步说明特定的平台格式如何加剧我们所确定的紧张局势。我们建议，当前平台政策的某些功能会激励跨学科的互动，从而突出显示通过内部资金推动跨学科尝试的价值的潜在限制。