KDI: Multidisciplinary Collaboration

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This is a three-year standard award. Recent advances in computing and telecommunications may have as much impact on multidisciplinary collaboration in science and industry as those technologies have had within business organizations and households. For instance, global networks make it possible to create project teams whose members include biologists, medical scientists, and managers in pharmaceutical firms. These changes may benefit from a better understanding of the requirements for successful multidisciplinary work, which often faces problems of both geographic and functional distance. Functional distance is a theoretical construct referring to a variety of cultural barriers to collaboration created by differences in norms, practices, and languages of differing disciplines or professions. This research will examine collaborations within and among disciplines using a variety of research strategies (e.g. interviews, citation analyses). A series of experiments will test hypotheses about the role of geographic and functional distance in the appropriation of ideas, privacy, attribution of credit, and productivity of collaborative projects. Finally, the PIs will develop and evaluate new computer applications for creating and supporting multidisciplinary collaborations. This research tackles a range of theoretical problems in the fields of social psychology, sociology, anthropology, and computer science. It will be important to science policy in describing how scientists organize their work in response to new technology, and more generally, in specifying the kinds of technology and management techniques that are required for successful teamwork and collaboration across time, space, and professional cultures and conditions. It will also aid in understanding how multidisciplinary work affects career patterns of scientists and professionals. Finally, the research will result in the development and test of usable computer-mediated communication technologies that help create and support collaborations.