Innovative Research through interdisciplinary collaboration

The opportunities and challenges presented by networking and interdisciplinary collaboration - the dossier kicks off with a guest commentary by Michael Quante. Prof. Michael Quante © WWU - Peter Wattendorff Vice-Rector for Internationalization and Knowledge Transfer The University of Münster is very well positioned as regards interdisciplinary research. It is a university offering the full range of subjects, and practically all of these subjects are located on site, making interdisciplinary collaboration easily possible. In addition, the University has strong research activities in both the major academic groupings of subjects - the Humanities and the Natural Sciences. This has - through the establishment of research alliances within these subject groupings - led not only to an interdisciplinarity which has proved its worth, but also to large-scale interdisciplinarity across both groupings. For years now, there has been a growing tendency to pass pressing social challenges to universities in the form of questions and assignments. In many cases, these questions cannot be addressed by individual disciplines.