Remote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideas 42
Abstract of a paper:Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries. Around the world, scientists and inventors are more plentiful and interconnected today than ever before. However, although there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be reconfigured in new ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find --contradicting recombinant growth theory. Here we shed light on this apparent puzzle. Analysing 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications from across the globe over the past half-century, we begin by documenting the rise of remote collaboration across cities, underlining the growing interconnectedness of scientists and inventors globally.
We further show that across all fields, periods and team sizes, researchers in these remote teams are consistently less likely to make breakthrough discoveries relative to their on-site counterparts. Creating a dataset that allows us to explore the division of labour in knowledge production within teams and across space, we find that among distributed team members, collaboration centres on late-stage, technical tasks involving more codified knowledge. Yet they are less likely to join forces in conceptual tasks -- such as conceiving new ideas and designing research -- when knowledge is tacit. We conclude that despite striking improvements in digital technology in recent years, remote teams are less likely to integrate the knowledge of their members to produce new, disruptive ideas.
We further show that across all fields, periods and team sizes, researchers in these remote teams are consistently less likely to make breakthrough discoveries relative to their on-site counterparts. Creating a dataset that allows us to explore the division of labour in knowledge production within teams and across space, we find that among distributed team members, collaboration centres on late-stage, technical tasks involving more codified knowledge. Yet they are less likely to join forces in conceptual tasks -- such as conceiving new ideas and designing research -- when knowledge is tacit. We conclude that despite striking improvements in digital technology in recent years, remote teams are less likely to integrate the knowledge of their members to produce new, disruptive ideas.
Complexity is the actual problem (Score:5, Insightful)
This has been a problem since before the internet. The complexity of producing real and significant innovation is growing and this slows the pace.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We can offset the world's carbon problem by converting all the earth's water to soda water.
Re:Complexity is the actual problem (Score:4, Insightful)
If you trust the study, they controlled for this by using current comparisons of local and remote collaborative groups.
My instinct is to question the study, because there appears to have been a lot of money and PR trying to get us back into the office long before this study.
Re: (Score:3)
BINGO!!
Pretty much anything that promotes "back to the office" needs to be examined with a wary eye....
There is apparently a LOT of potential loss in the commercial real estate market with loans/refinancing coming due soon....and a lot of major players potentially could be losing big money.
Is it the Vanguards and Blackrocks that are exposed to this i
Re: (Score:2)
My instinct is to question the study, because there appears to have been a lot of money and PR trying to get us back into the office long before this study.
BINGO!!
Pretty much anything that promotes "back to the office" needs to be examined with a wary eye....
There is apparently a LOT of potential loss in the commercial real estate market with loans/refinancing coming due soon....and a lot of major players potentially could be losing big money.
Is it the Vanguards and Blackrocks t
Seems intuitively correct to me... not to others. (Score:5, Informative)
In the last 30 years, when I think of the truly great moments of inspired thinking in my teams, they've all been in person. I once spent an hour diagramming a complex solution on whiteboards with my team, and when I was almost done, one of my direct reports stood up, walked over, and said, "This is horseshit. Why would we do this?" Then he drew a gigantic X over fully 2/3rds of the solution, and added three arrows to it. He was right, I was beyond pleased, and we built a much better solution in a small fraction of the time. I don't know we could have done the same thing with Teams sessions and some Miro-like tool. It just doesn't work.
I have not changed my view since the pandemic. Remote work is fine for methodical plodding, and routine delivery. But it isn't where great collaborative moments will regularly arise. Remote sessions, in my experience, end up aligning too quickly with one person's view - and no matter how smart that one person is, somebody challenging them constructively is ALWAYS a net benefit. And confrontation through a monitor is just not the same. Introverts can hide so easily behind (or off) camera.
Re:Seems intuitively correct to me... not to other (Score:4, Insightful)
In-person collaboration doesn't need to happen or even be an option every single day
In-person is great, but not needed all the time (Score:2)
Even assuming that the study's results are valid, that applies to those situations where breakthroughs would be happening anyway. Seldom do we have team-wide "aha!" moments from us all individually plowing through our separate workloads -- instead, we have those moments when we have occasion to meet (in whatever format) and discuss something in a group.
Where I work, upper management has taken the approach that each team should set its own minimum on-site hours, based on the needs of that team. For my own
Re: (Score:2)
While I agree, I'll admit that there isn't necessarily a day where you can say, "Oh, today is collaboration day." Some of what happens is serendipitous. Having everyone together improves the chances of this kind of collaboration.
A company I worked for used to have quarterly "Big Room Planning" sessions where everyone came in and planned the quarterly work. A bi-product of this was getting a bunch of smart people together to discuss things in-person. Sometimes interesting ideas came out. Sometimes they
Re: (Score:3)
It might not have happened during the Zoom call, but you were likely to clock in the next morning to an email going, "Hey Petersko, I went over that huge diagram after the meeting. WTF are you smoking? Why not just do this instead?"
Re: (Score:2)
I guess my point is that I'm not likely to clock in and find that email. I work for a consultancy, so I've had 5 project teams over the last three years, with a small amount of continuation - i.e. only a couple of people out of about 30 carried over between gigs. Groupthink and default agreement are far more prevalent (in my experience) now than I've ever seen in my career.
Most recently I had to do a project rescue for another struggling lead. When I took the gig I had an initial teams meeting and learned n
Re: (Score:2)
In the last 30 years, when I think of the truly great moments of inspired thinking in my teams, they've all been in person.
Well, that's almost true for me, too, but it's also not a fair comparison. Until the last few months, approximately all of the closely collaborative work I've ever done has been in person, whereas bulls**t meetings have existed both in person and remotely. And folks tend to zone out in the latter.
I once spent an hour diagramming a complex solution on whiteboards with my team, and when I was almost done, one of my direct reports stood up, walked over, and said, "This is horseshit. Why would we do this?" Then he drew a gigantic X over fully 2/3rds of the solution, and added three arrows to it. He was right, I was beyond pleased, and we built a much better solution in a small fraction of the time. I don't know we could have done the same thing with Teams sessions and some Miro-like tool. It just doesn't work.
Not sure why you think that. There's nothing special about in-person interaction. People who don't care about what you're talking about are still going to be zoning out during in-person meetings and doing somet
Re: (Score:2)
Depends on your team. Being able to zoom and pan your big diagram on my screen means I'm more likely to spot issues than if I'm squinting it myopically across a conference table.
Quality over quantity, thanks. (Score:4, Insightful)
I know they think disruptive is a good thing. Recent history as well as the traditional understanding of the word suggests it is not necessarily a good thing.
Suspicious (Score:3)
I wonder if this study was paid for by office space real estate interests. It just seems like a new spin on "remote workers are ruining the economy".
But what about AI? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh Jesus Fucking Christ.... (Score:5, Insightful)
We've also seen a massive pullback from government & corporate funding. Anyone remember Bell Labs? That's the one folks on this forum know but there's plenty more examples. Companies and their lobbyists want quick profits and they want them this quarter. And they want tax cuts. Lots and lots of tax cuts. And that means less government money floating around. The moon landing was $152 billion dollars. Can you name a single project of that size in the United States? Hell, we can barely get people to pony up $42b replacing lead pipes in the entire freakin' country...
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
My Most Productive Collaborations (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Alternative explanations (Score:3)
Outsourcing gets companies what they paid for. Academics prefer keeping their real research close at home and mostly do remote collaboration as a hobby with friends.
Re: (Score:2)
0.08 percentage point difference (Score:4, Interesting)
The probability of proposing new scientific concepts decreases from 0.40% to 0.32% for papers and the probability of introducing new technology codes decreases from 3.33% to 3.22% for patents, when switching from onsite to remote.
I mean, with a difference of 0.08 percentage points, we should definitely defund all research that uses remote researchers.
For patents, they saw a 0.11 percentage point difference.
Can that kind of difference really be distinguished from statistical noise?
No wonder they didn't want to put the numbers in the abstract!
Re: (Score:2)
There's been a lot of sneering about this study here, but it jibes with my own experience, that the breakthroughs tend to happen in person.
I don't like commuting either, but I actually tell people "you want me on site" now, because it really does make a difference. At least to me.
Re: (Score:2)
The relative difference between 0.40% and 0.32% is 20%, not 0.08%.
See definition of "percentage point". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] a percentage point difference is not the same as a percent difference.
Your personal experience isn't very relevant, and it differs from mine. My all-remote team is high-functioning and collaborates extremely well. We brainstorm ideas and come up with creative solutions constantly.
The two measurements cited--number of papers published, and number of patents filed--neither of these is a good measure of the amount of actual innovation. My
Re: (Score:2)
The relative difference between 0.40% and 0.32% is 20%, not 0.08%.
See definition of "percentage point". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] a percentage point difference is not the same as a percent difference.
Looks like I failed to communicate the point.
It doesn't matter whether it's percent or percentage points, because the ratio is still 20% which is not insignificant.
Re: (Score:2)
I understood your point perfectly. My point is that in this case, the ratio is not the important number. There is no way that, with that many studies (20 million) they were able to assess and control for the quality of the research in all of those studies. Maybe fewer of the remote teams published, because more of them determined that there was a flaw in their research making it unfit for publication. Maybe more of the on-site teams felt more pressure to publish because there were in the physical presence o
this research was brougt to you by (Score:2)
*Grabs Popcorn...* (Score:2)
Gonna have fun watching the Remote Bros froth over this post.
Re: (Score:1)
jajaja
As a remote bro, I don't care either way.
If you can't come up with breakthrough ideas its not due to your work environment. Its because you don't do drugs.
Of course new ideas are getting harder to find (Score:2)
>research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find --contradicting recombinant growth theory.
Because it is taking more and more Infrastructure of various types to do so - First of all and mainly for a lot of fields is equipment, computers, algorithms, etc.
It simply takes a lot more resources to find stuff. What we find first, of course, are the low hanging fruit, the easiest to spot and delve into. Oftentimes this does NOT create any more low hanging fruit, but *harder* problems, not easier.
So
\o/ (Score:1)
Up next, a new study which proves conclusively that working remotely makes one 313% less appealing to the opposite sex.
Buzzword BINGO! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is my friend giant salt grain. (Score:5, Insightful)
Seeing how Nature has been having all the hits recently [nature.com]. Pardon me if I read this analysis with my buddy the giant grain of salt here. Especially an analysis that pitches no fundamental hypothesis on the underlying phenomenon they are describing outside of here's my python sketchbook I made [dropbox.com], so that someone could actually test if that hypothesis was correct. Nope. Just here's me, my code, and this pattern I think exists, publish me senpai! Especially against the backdrop of oh so many who want us all to travel back into cities to justify the stupid prices people have attributed to ridiculous buildings. "Please, if you love breakthrough ideas, please come back and justify the existence of this $4B building!!"
So nah, I don't buy this shit out the gate. There's an awfully strong lobby that wants folks to throw away two hours of their life everyday, so that property speculators can rest easy at night. And someone just Pythoning their way through some datasets and saying "well I guess remote workers don't come up with great ideas" while at the same time you have these companies going "MY GOD I JUST CANNOT OFFSHORE THIS SHIT FAST ENOUGH!! Why won't you all come into my office building I pay $2M/month in rent for?" Nah. Something smelly going on and my guess is that it's people funding folks to sift through curated data [dropbox.com] to come to a conclusion. There's going to be a need for a bit more than just "ta-da, this is what my calculator shows" Especially given how big an incentive there is to force people back. [businessinsider.com] And how often Nature has been fucking up this part of the year. I mean fuck, we can all do the meta-analysis game and putting it as peudo-study all day long. [science.org] That's never been a problem for someone to sketch up python, eat half a gig of Excel spreadsheets, and then ask someone to give me some money to justify my existence. We've been doing that for quite some time now, shit that's old game.
Big old fucking grain of salt here. To quote the tan man himself, "Yuuuge!"
Oh and then of course we're going to have all the anecdote folks coming out saying, "Oh well on-site works so much better for me!" And you know what? Cool. Don't let me slow you down. But 80% of the on-site that I've ever done, well I'll just say, that movie "Office Space" didn't pop out of a vacuum. I'm over a team of eleven, and we're more productive remote than any team I've ever been with on-site. But YMMV and that's why I think this anecdote folks, I'm not saying your wrong, but there's a difference between "in general" and "in particular" and it's worthwhile to preface your inevitable love for the conference room with that in mind. I'm not saying stop being "on site" what I'm saying is in particular do what's best for your team. If on-site is it, go for it. If remote is it, go for it. But to have this group sit here and say "well in general, it's best if everyone just worked on-site and the rationale for that is my Python codes says so" that's where I run into the feeling of saying "I'm sorry, it's going to take a bit more than that to convince me otherwise, in a general sense".
Re: (Score:2)
I mean fuck, we can all do the meta-analysis game and putting it as peudo-study all day long. [science.org]
You just summed up my opinion right there. Meta-analyses are the best type of study. You can prove anything with meta-analysis. Just come up with a set of studies to include that support your conclusions, and a set of studies to exclude that don't, then work backwards to a set of seemingly plausible reasons for including or excluding those specific studies, do the "analysis", write your paper, and you're done.
Whether a meta-analysis is worth the paper it is printed on or not is entirely dependent on whet
Report brought to you by... (Score:2)
selecton bias? (Score:2)