Innovate Against Time: Drivers and Mechanisms of Knowledge Innovation Within and Across Organizations

Georgia Tech Research Corporation, Atlanta GA

Investigators

Abstract

Many of the most urgent and complex problems facing society today require collaboration among large numbers of individual scientists possessing diverse expertise, representing different embedding organizations (e.g., universities, corporations, or government entities), and widely distributed across time and space. Scientists working together in such arrangements are often called science teams, and there is accordingly an increasing realization that collaboration within and among these teams has become a core competency required to succeed in scientific endeavors. Science policy has long recognized the challenges associated with interdisciplinary research. These challenges arise from multiple sources; for example, the departmental structure of universities and other organizations creates incompatible tacit norms which often prevent or stifle interaction across units. Despite the fact that science research has long recognized these challenges, the question of how best to overcome them remains inadequately answered. Given that many of the problems of greatest importance to society require science teams that cross multiple boundaries, it has become imperative that social science develop a concrete body of practical knowledge on how to design and structure synergistic systems of teams to achieve scientific research goals. Toward this aim, this project answers the overarching question: How should (a) leadership structures and (b) communication networks be designed to best facilitate the innovation of knowledge in multiteam systems (MTSs). To address this question, a multi-university international research team is conducting a large-scale highly controlled field quasi-experiment involving more than 100 MTSs. Each MTS is comprised of three interacting teams: a team of EU business students in Grenoble, France; a team of US psychology students in Fairfax, VA; and a team of US engineering students in Orlando, FL. MTSs are working together for two months from three locations, conjoining their backgrounds and expertise sets to innovate against time. We manipulate and randomly assign 3-team multiteam systems to conditions of leadership and communication networks and track the impact of these factors on the interactions and outcomes that follow. Broader Impacts. This project develops an evidentiary basis to inform policymakers at the institution level on how to manage scientific collaborations involving their institutions. In particular, this study sheds new light on how to create the context within which the essential innovation can spark into knowledge. The project identifies the structural and interactional building blocks of successful collaboration in scientific teams that are geographically distributed, affected by complex social and motivational forces, and linked through information and communications technology to innovate using knowledge across temporal and spatial boundaries. A second set of broader impacts of the project concern the education of four communities: (1) future scientists, (2) science-policy leaders, (3) academics in multiple disciplines, and (4) students in several interdisciplinary programs. The project actively trains future scientists, engineers, businesspeople, and entrepreneurs to collaborate in distributed, international, multidisciplinary teams and creates new curricula in distributed multidisciplinary teamwork to be taught at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. The study's results support a much-needed collaborative theory of team structure and leadership. Lastly, the research program also reaches out directly to science policy leaders by offering a science leadership course through George Mason University.