Earlier this month, London's Director Magazine published a fantastic profile on the innovation efforts going on at Arup – the 10,000-person strong engineering firm behind such notable projects as the Sydney Opera House and the Aquatics Center for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games (shown above). Founded shortly after the end of the Second World War, Arup has grown far beyond its humble beginnings, yet it seems to have retained its early pioneering and innovative spirit. And as we all know, that's no small feat for such a large organization.

Beyond thinking long-term, running an "innovation" school to teach managers how to support progressive employees, remaining employee-owned, and keeping management structures decentralized, Arup has also made it a conscious effort to support teams that consider questions and projects that most other firms won't touch. As the article notes, these teams don't just solve hairy engineering problems, they also boost the entire firm's reputation:

"Image helps. Framing challenging questions and devoting a small department to answering the unanswerable, offers a neat reputation wrapper. It signals to the client that Arup is unafraid of uncertainty. And it signals to current and future employees that this is a firm at which personal ambitions can be met."

But that's not all that makes the innovation and strategy folks at Arup so unique. It's their appreciation for, and understanding of hybrid thinking that seems to really set them apart from the competition. As the paragraphs below note, Arup's leaders recognize the value of mashing-up disciplines, particularly when facing challenges that are new to the world. Furthermore, they are well aware of the power of hybrid thinking to cut through ambiguity to reach fundamentally new insights.

"Quite often, problem-solving innovation is created by 'happy' clashes between different disciplines. Arup is a firm of engineers, designers, accountants, architects, marketing professionals and graphic designers. Engineers tackle architectural problems, designers try to answer engineering questions and technologists join forces with mathematicians to enable new angles to be explored. It's what's known as hybrid thinking.

Hybrid thinking, says [Peter Young, Arup's UK head of advanced technology and research], is particularly handy in researching nascent industries. One of Arup's current projects, investigating the impact of electric vehicles on urban infrastructure, illustrates the point. 'Even if I wanted to,’ says Young, ‘it would be very difficult to go to the marketplace and recruit 10 electric vehicles experts because there aren't really any electric vehicle experts. It's rather new. We take people who have a broad problem-solving approach, an open mind, and say, 'here's the problem'.'"

By definition, the applications of hybrid thinking are broad, and it's great to see its adoption spreading across industries and now continents. From enterprise architecture researchers at Gartner to the 2010 Design Hotels conference to the Arup engineers mentioned above, there is clear sense that today's challenges require fundamentally new approaches to problem solving. And at the epicenter of these approaches is hybrid thinking.

Once again, I'd highly encourage you to check out the Arup profile in Director Magazine.