āRemote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideasā, 2022-06-04 ()ā :
Scientists and inventors around the world are more plentiful and interconnected today than ever before. But while there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be reconfigured in novel ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find-contradicting recombinant growth theory. In this paper, we shed new light on this apparent puzzle.
Analyzing 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications across the globe over the past half-century, we begin by documenting the rise of remote collaboration across locations, underlining the growing interconnectedness of scientists and inventors globally.
However, we also show that for all fields, periods, and team sizes, researchers in these distributed teams are consistently less likely to make breakthrough discoveries relative to their onsite counterparts. Using a novel dataset that allows us to explore the division of labor within each team, we find that distributed team members tend to collaborate in technical tasks-like collecting and analyzing data-but are less likely to join forces in conceptual tasks, such as conceiving new ideas and designing research.
Hence, while remote teams collaborate in theory, actual cooperation centers on late-stage, technical project tasks, involving more codified knowledge.
We conclude that despite striking improvements in remote work technology in recent years, remote teams are less likely to integrate existing knowledge to produce new, disruptive ideas. This also provides an explanation for why new ideas are getting harder to find.
[Potentially totally misinterpreted? According to Nick Bloom:
This is a great paper, but it is massively misunderstood. It does not show that WFH reduces innovation. This paper and its follow-up actually suggests by 2023 that WFH increases innovation. To explain:
This paper is about collocation not WFH. They are completely different. If two people share the same office addressāeven if they are both hybrid or remoteāthey would be classified as collocated. For example, my co-author Steve Davis and I both work a hybrid schedule at Stanford, coming to the office maybe 2 days a week. We both have a Stanford office address on papers. So, for this paper we would count as being collocated. Indeed, almost all hybrid WFH teams would count as collocated.
Co-author teams are becoming more dispersed. The paper reports the average distance between team members offices has increased from 100km to 1,000km over the last 60 years. This reveals that tens of thousands of scientists are choosing to work in more global teams, presumably to access a wider network of experts. I co-author with researchers across 5 continents because it lets me work with great people. If teams of elite scientists, whose entire careers are focused on cutting-edge innovation, are becoming more dispersed it suggests it has major benefits.
The results do not hold after 2010. This is critical as Zoom and Dropbox cloud file sharing emerged after 2010. Indeed the follow-up paper by Carl Frey (one of the co-authors) and Giorgio President from Oxford shows innovation is higher for remote collaboration after 2010!
ā¦And please forward this to any mangers or CEOs claiming this implies WFH reduces innovation. It does notāindeed #2 & #3 suggest exactly the reverse.]