Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas
Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas
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DOI：
10.1038/s41586-023-06767-1
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发表时间：
2022-06
期刊：
影响因子：
64.8
通讯作者：
Yiling Lin;C. Frey;Lingfei Wu
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Yiling Lin;C. Frey;Lingfei Wu
创新理论强调社交网络和团队作为突破性发现的促进者的作用。在世界各地，科学家和发明家比以往任何时候都更加丰富和相互联系。然而，尽管有更多的人做出发现，更多的想法可以以新的方式重新配置，研究表明，新的想法越来越难找到，-与重组增长理论相矛盾。在这里，我们揭示了这个明显的谜团。通过分析过去半个世纪以来来自地球仪的2000万篇研究论文和400万份专利申请，我们开始记录了城市间远程协作的兴起，强调了全球科学家和发明家之间日益增长的相互联系。我们进一步表明，在所有领域，时期和团队规模，在这些远程团队的研究人员始终不太可能取得突破性的发现相对于他们的现场同行。创建一个数据集，使我们能够探索团队内部和跨空间的知识生产分工，我们发现，在分布式团队成员中，协作中心位于后期，涉及更多编码知识的技术任务。然而，当知识是隐性的时，他们不太可能在概念性的任务中联合起来，比如构思新的想法和设计研究。我们的结论是，尽管近年来数字技术有了惊人的进步，但远程团队不太可能整合成员的知识来产生新的、颠覆性的想法。
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.