1. What brought you to INTED?
At the time, I was the managing director of a small company when Anders and Anja contacted me and asked whether I would be willing to contribute to an external advisory panel during the application process for INTED. They wanted input from a business perspective, particularly regarding what I look for when hiring people and how higher education can prepare students for a working life characterized by complexity and rapid change. These questions resonated strongly with my own experiences, and when INTED was later established as a center, I was invited to take on a position connected to its work.
2. What inspires or drives your interest in interdisciplinarity?
I have spent much of my career working in depth on specific challenges, but I find that the most innovative ideas often emerge when different perspectives meet. Stepping outside one's familiar disciplinary horizon opens the door to new insights and unexpected connections. It is about having the courage to think outside the box.
3. How are higher education and working life connected, and what role does interdisciplinarity play?
All the challenges I work with, whether in the private or public sector, are complex. Most of them are what we would call wicked problems. The most interesting challenges are often multifaceted and require insights from several disciplines at the same time. In practice, this means that people almost always work in teams with highly diverse professional backgrounds. The ability to collaborate across disciplines has therefore become a fundamental competence in modern working life. Over the past ten years, I have worked extensively with problem framing, the process of identifying and defining the right problem. This is also something I look for when hiring people. There are many talented problem-solvers, but fewer people who are able to define a problem effectively. This is a competence that often develops best in interdisciplinary contexts.
When a problem is properly defined, specialized knowledge can be applied more precisely and effectively. Today, we spend enormous amounts of time, money, and resources solving the wrong problems. I believe interdisciplinarity contributes to better use of resources and the development of more effective solutions.
4. How should education be designed to develop interdisciplinary skills?
This is something we work on continuously. I think of interdisciplinary skills as existing on a spectrum. At one level, they involve collaborating effectively with others, understanding different perspectives, and contributing constructively within a team. At another level, there are more active roles, such as facilitators, who help create integration between disciplines and people. An important starting point is ensuring that students are exposed to different disciplinary perspectives and are given genuine opportunities to explore areas beyond their primary field of study. When students discover that this increases their competence and broadens their academic toolkit, it often sparks curiosity and a desire to explore further.
For students who already have a strong interest in interdisciplinarity, it is important to create opportunities to combine disciplines at an advanced level. It is not enough to simply scratch the surface without sufficient disciplinary depth. Students need solid expertise in their own discipline while also learning to see how that knowledge connects with other fields. In addition, there are more general competencies, often referred to as soft skills, such as openness, relationship-building, dialogue, and practical collaboration methods like brainwriting. These are skills that can be taught and developed. I believe it is important to establish structures that allow students to build these competencies gradually, from short workshops to full master's programmes, with increasing levels of complexity, challenge, supervision, and support.
5. With interdisciplinarity on the rise, what do you see as the future of higher education?
I hope universities become more universal again. The term itself has origins connected to broad learning and intellectual development, rather than purely professional or vocational training. Interdisciplinarity can play an important role in moving in that direction, and INTED represents a concrete effort to translate these ambitions into practice. At the same time, it is important to think carefully about how both physical and organizational structures are designed so that they genuinely promote collaboration and learning across disciplines. For me, the key is that INTED succeeds in institutionalizing this work. We have an opportunity to serve as an example of how interdisciplinary education and collaboration can be embedded and further developed within a university.
From a business perspective, I am also particularly interested in strengthening the connection between higher education and working life. Everyone agrees that interdisciplinary skills are important, but we still know too little about how graduates with interdisciplinary education perform in the workplace. Understanding how interdisciplinary education translates into professional practice, and what value it creates over time, is an area that I believe deserves much more attention. Such knowledge will be important both for the further development of educational programmes and for the field as a whole. It is challenging research because it takes time before the effects become visible, but it is necessary if we want to understand and continue developing interdisciplinarity in a meaningful way.