In recent academic history, why has research funding increasingly focused upon large interdisciplinary teams?
Personal experience, and a lot of inspiration from nature (I'm a biologist) suggests that interdisciplinary teams can view a single problem from different perspectives.
This enables teams with varying knowledge to attack a problem from the easiest angle.

For example,

When Canadians faced the problem of snow accumulating and freezing on power lines, men were sent up power-poles armed with poles of their own with a hook on the end to shake off the snow. When they were complaining about how tough the job was to each other (and coming up with pole &amp; climbing related ideas to make the work easier), the secretary to the manager overseeing their work chimed in to say that when she was a nurse in the army, she'd seen the downdraft from helicopters knock objects around with ease.

Her fresh perspective introduced a new line of thought that would not have otherwise been introduced into the problem solving atmosphere.

When you're a hammer, every problem begins to look like a nail. When you're a toolbox full of different tools, however......