ABSTRACT
This chapter explores a simple heuristic of institutions, tools and people to offer a perspective on the challenge of sustaining interdisciplinarity. The Vienna Declaration states the most urgent and important innovations in the 21st century will take place in the social field. Reid point out that addressing the grand challenges' of 21st century requires that research dominated by the natural sciences must transition towards research integrating the full range of science and humanities'. The theme of the summer school, Societal Energies', provided an opportunity and a space for cross-fertilization of ideas between the engineering and social sciences. Although the initial axis of the exchange was between the Institute of Process and Particle Engineering, TU Graz and the Department of Sociology, University College Cork (UCC), it quickly became situated in the wider internal institutional configurations in the university. Bringing exchange to fruition relied not just on funding, but also on well-established and frequently espoused academic values of collegiality and reciprocity.
