Digital Science and Knowledge Boundaries in Complex Innovation
通过对85位药物发现领域科学家和管理者的访谈，发现数字科学家与治疗科学家之间存在知识断层，数字科学虽能提供互补性见解，但也制造了新的知识边界，需整合两者知识才能应对复杂创新挑战。
Drug discovery is a complex innovation process in which scientists need to make sense of ambiguous findings and grapple with numerous unpredictable interdependencies over many years of product development. Digitalization has combined with expanding science to address this complexity, creating new ways to measure, analyze, and model chemical compounds, diseases, and human biology. We interviewed 85 scientists and managers working on drug discovery to understand how they deal with complexity. We find a major knowledge fault line between digital scientists, who use computers as laboratories and manipulate signs, and therapy scientists, who use conventional laboratories and manipulate physical material. We build on research on epistemic cultures and knowing in practice to develop empirically grounded theory for the role of digital science in complex innovation. We propose that digitalization creates a new form of knowledge that provides essential complementary insights for complex innovation that cannot exist otherwise. However, digitalization also creates new knowledge boundaries that concern central activities of innovation. These boundaries highlight challenges of complex innovation that digital sciences can help address, but only if the innovation activities are transformed so that digital and therapy sciences can integrate their complementary knowledge.