To Carry Out Cross-disciplinary Innovation—With Electrospraying as an Example for Teaching Postgraduate Students

It is a common sense that innovations are easy to be created at the boundaries of different disciplines. Howerver, how to lead the postgraduate students, particualrly those are pursuing their master degree, to realize their cross-disciplinary innovations in their initial research life is a heavy task for their supervisors. In this paper, an advanced technology, electrospraying, is exploited as an excellent example to teach the postgraduate students to carry out their innovation processes, where the innovations happen not only in itself, but also in the selections of raw materials and the functional applications of the final products. The multiple disciplines, including polymer science, bioengineering, pharmaceutics, and food science, can collect together to the electrospraying processes for creating something new by crossing boundaries, and for thinking across them. Combining with the usage of modern advanced nanotechnology, and starting from the functional applications of nanomaterials, a series of similar innovations can be conceived along the approach demonstrated here.