What’s Actually New About Transdisciplinarity? How Scholars from Applied Studies Can Benefit from Cross-disciplinary Learning Processes on Transdisciplinarity Marianne Penker and Andreas Muhar The complexity of current problems of society, the high level of uncertainty and the high decision stakes involved call for a new form of transdisciplinary knowledge production that integrates society in research processes (Klein et al. 2001; Hirsch Hadorn et al. 2008; Bammer 2005; Gibbons et al. 1994; Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993). Didn’t transdisciplinarity actually exist before this discourse, but under dif- ferent names? Has transdisciplinarity even worked best in traditional applied fields of science that have just not been labelled before as being transdisciplinary, such as agricultural sciences, development studies, medicine or planning? In these fields, cross-disciplinary knowledge integration and participatory research have had a clear instrumental value long before the current transdisciplinary discourse. Therefore, scholars from such disciplines might challenge the innovativeness and newness of transdisciplinary research and question its benefit. This chapter looks into the mer- its of researching and teaching transdisciplinarity on top of doing it. International and cross-disciplinary exchange can address crucial questions of group size and group compositions, adequate funding conditions and methods that help to deal with powerful interest groups and thus contribute to high quality, legitimate and societal effective outcomes of transdisciplinary research processes. By publishing and teach- ing on transdisciplinarity, we make specific concepts and approaches accessible to the critique of others. Thus we can benefit from the academic principle of scepticism that is a key for quality management and effective innovation processes. Introduction Applied sciences, such as planning studies, food or agricultural sciences, develop- ment or sustainability studies are often confronted with wicked problems (Rittel and Webber 1973), i.e. ambiguous problem definitions or unclear, conflicting and M. Penker () · A. Muhar University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, Austria e-mail: marianne.penker@boku.ac.at © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2015 135 P. Gibbs (ed.), Transdisciplinary Professional Learning and Practice, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-11590-0_10