Multi-Point Forming tool surface (courtesy of AUTOMAN, a project sponsored by EPSRC and Innovate UK Grant No. EP/L505225/1).
At an annual dinner of Cardiff University Innovation Network several years ago, the University gave me a special award for my contribution “to innovation and to the links between university and industry”. The award, which was to celebrate my successes at attracting external research funds, was itself an innovation by the then Vice-Chancellor, Sir Brian Smith, as no such award had been made before then and, as far as I know, none since.
In my acceptance speech, I recounted a story from my school days when an inspector asked the class what one and one made. Most pupils offered the arithmetically correct answer, “two”. However, one boy thought of a different possibility – “eleven” was his reply. That was exactly my case: the University had invested £1M in supporting my activities; the Welsh Government had also provided £1M in grants to my group; together, these sums had enabled my colleagues and me to leverage an additional £9M from other sources. Thus, one plus one indeed gave eleven.
There are other answers as well: one plus one could equal three, four or even five, as in The Pet Shop Boys’ song titled “One and One Make Five”. Although arithmetically none of these answers makes sense, they are a manifestation of synergy, an emergent property of many natural and man-made systems where the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
Another example of synergy can be seen in the emergent shape created by the tips of the pins in a multi-point forming tool like the device being produced at Birmingham as part of a project sponsored by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and Innovate UK. Individually, each pin tip defines only one point in space. However, together the tips constitute a complex 3D surface that cannot be visualised by considering each pin tip in isolation.
Other well-known instances of synergy are to be found in teamwork where a group of collaborating people can accomplish more than the totality of the individual members’ achievements, or in merging of different business units where economies of scale can be realised through avoiding duplication and reducing inefficiencies and costs. Human synergy from collaboration is the most frequently quoted benefit of bringing departments together while cost savings due to corporate synergy are often the real driver behind such moves.
In the post-REF-2014 period, with departmental mergers being rife in UK Higher Education, it is salutary to remember that negative as well as positive synergy can happen in a merger. For example, research has found that four out of ten managers in business and industry, or three times the normal rate, leave during the first 24 months of a merger (http://www.mergerintegration.com/acquisitions/recruit-key-managers-employees-retention) and, when a company is acquired, even if there is no significant impact on their job, the percentage of actively disengaged employees increases by 23%. Furthermore, it takes up to three years to reach the pre-merger level of highly engaged employees (http://www.aon.com/attachments/human-capital-consulting/2013_Managing_Engagement_During_Times_of_Change_White_Paper.pdf.)
In other words, without appropriate safeguards, one and one could well equal zero, as it certainly does in modulo-2 arithmetic.
http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/mechanical-engineering/index.aspx