A technique I have used in my own work to combat increasing specialization is to assemble the experts that I have gathered for a project (for example, my speech recognition work included speech scientists, linguists, psychoacousticians, and pattern recognition experts, not to mention computer scientists) and encourage each one to teach the group his particular techniques and terminology. We then throw out all of that terminology and make up our own. Invariably we find metaphors from one field that solve problems in another.
