While interdisciplinarity has been widely addressed in higher education policies and university strategies across countries, universities and colleges are struggling with the implementation at the programme level. For instance, extant literature implies many barriers to establishing interdisciplinary degree programmes (IDPs). However, there is a lack of both conceptual understandings and empirical investigations on how these barriers can be resolved through appropriate management. Our paper addresses this research gap by constructing an analytical framework for understanding the cause of barriers in the context of establishing IDPs and managerial approaches to overcome them through the lens of managing organisational innovation, and applying it in an empirical study of two cases of establishing IDPs at a Finnish research university. Our study yielded four conceptualised and tested propositions on key factors that middle-level university managers should consider for both preventing and resolving barriers to establishing IDPs. It suggests that while managers should plan IDPs that largely fit the institutional environment and bring foreseeable benefits to participants in the programmes, the art of their management lies in leveraging all relevant resources to enhance institutional compatibility, to change peoples’ perceptions about profitability and to empower other participants’ agency.

虽然跨学科已在各国高等教育政策和大学战略中得到广泛解决，但大学和学院仍在计划层面上努力实施。例如，现有文献暗示建立跨学科学位课程 (IDP) 存在许多障碍。然而，对于如何通过适当的管理解决这些障碍，缺乏概念理解和实证研究。我们的论文通过构建一个分析框架来理解在建立 IDP 的背景下障碍的原因和通过管理组织创新的视角克服障碍的管理方法，并将其应用于建立 IDP 的两个案例的实证研究，从而填补了这一研究空白在芬兰研究型大学。我们的研究就中层大学管理者在预防和解决建立 IDP 的障碍时应考虑的关键因素提出了四个概念化和经过测试的命题。它表明，虽然管理人员应该计划在很大程度上适合机构环境并为计划参与者带来可预见利益的 IDP，但他们的管理艺术在于利用所有相关资源来增强机构兼容性，改变人们对盈利能力的看法并赋予权力其他参与者的代理机构。