Over the past five decades, our scientific team’s original research on change has been carried on in parallel with our applied scientific work, at the heart of which, since 1986, has been the development and licensing of our proprietary Minimalist Intervention technology.
While our early research had been based mainly at the University of Oxford through 1980 (as well as in London from 1976–82 and in Cardiff, Wales from 1979–1980, in parallel), Interchange Research through the 1980s and 1990s was headquartered successively in Oxford from 1982–84, London from 1985–90 (first in West London, in Uxbridge at Brunel University and in Richmond-upon-Thames; and later in Central London, in the iconic Bowater House, Knightsbridge), and finally in Cambridge from 1991–98 (first on Cambridge Science Park and then at the Daly Laboratories, Babraham Hall, Cambridge). Since 1998 the research activities of Interchange Research have been based in the beautiful, ancient, World Heritage City of Bath.
Meetings not only with our own researchers but also with visiting scholars from other institutes and universities around the world are held at the Interchange Research Centre by arrangement. For our research also still goes on in parallel globally, not least as many of our far-flung researchers have always also held research and teaching positions, as they do today, at the University of Oxford, the Sorbonne, and other leading universities around the world.
From the start, and to the present day, Interchange Research has been run the way any other scientific lab has ever been run anywhere: viz., with the research team members working under the strict control of a lead investigator, working exclusively on his research programme, not on theirs, no matter how eminent each might be outside the think-tank within their own specialisms. Most of our distinguished researchers over the past five decades have independently, meanwhile, continued to pursue their own careers in their own fields in parallel with their work for Interchange—again, as is true of any such scientific lab.
As older members retired and stepped back from active involvement in the team’s work, and as others moved on to concentrate on their own research, sometimes taking up new appointments on the other side of the world, new investigators were brought on board and younger members were recruited and trained.
In this way, the dedicated, highly focussed research programme of Interchange Research has managed to continue uninterrupted, year in, year out, under continuous scientific leadership, ever since the work’s inception half a century ago, while constantly being refreshed by the infusion of new blood—the rising stars of tomorrow. Though we have never had any shortage of accomplished, academic elders on board, for decades ours has always been predominantly a young team, and always will be.
All our research at Interchange since 1971 has been dedicated to the study of change—and, in the process, unlocking the secrets of the universe, as a new scientific epistemology has been brought to bear on old scientific problems (“new” meaning “roughly a century old,” the new epistemology having first gained prominence in scientific circles only as recently as the 1920s, in contrast to the still strangely incumbent “old” scientific epistemology which has not changed fundamentally since the 1500s.)
Our investigations into the nature and dynamics of change, ever since we started five decades ago, have been focussed within four principal areas of scientific and philosophical research. These are represented by four separate Interchange Research Centres, where different specialist expertise is brought to bear.