Are Special Sessions in ESREL Impacting the Cross-Sector Learning?

Many researchers, especially of the safety dimension of risk, advocate that lessons learned from accident investigations should be transferred between different industry sectors – a concept usually known as 'cross-sector learning'. Expanding this idea to conferences, many attendees expect to experience a 'cross-discipline knowledge transfer'. This means that if you are, for example, an attendee interested in reliability modelling, you could benefit from seeing how different sectors such as aviation, maritime and nuclear are investing in new technology in the same session. However, in the last five years, there has been a significant increase in the number of special sessions in ESREL – the European Safety and Reliability Conference (ESREL). There might be benefits such as deeper exploration of an emerging topic, but there is also a risk that having the main risk disciplines being scattered in many special sessions, their most experienced specialists are not going to be present in the same room to contribute, criticise and compare how that discipline is being used in many domains.
This paper analyses how special sessions have been rising in ESREL conferences through the years, and if the papers presented could have another distribution within the most traditional disciplines and domains.

Keywords: ESREL conference, Special sessions, Cross-sector learning, Organizational learning.