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Collaborative Research: Understanding Team Success and Failure

协作研究：了解团队的成功和失败

基本信息

批准号：
1829366
负责人：
James Evans
金额：
$ 34.28万
依托单位：
University of Chicago
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2018
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2018-08-15 至 2022-07-31
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1829366&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Collaborative Research Understanding Team Success

项目摘要

One of the most fundamental and universal shifts in modern science and technology is the flourishing of teams in all areas of science, scholarship, invention and entrepreneurship as solitary researchers vanish. Teams constitute the social engines that drive new developments with an increasing dominance in science and technology. Nevertheless, little is known about the process through which teams succeed and fail as the vast majority of studies are based on observation and analysis of successful teams alone. For example, most team research is restricted to teams that successfully formed in the first place, resulting in a joint publication or patent. In reality, most teams fail, sometimes in a spectacular manner. This fact suggests that our current understanding of teams suffers from systematic selection bias where failed teams have largely been ignored because the data that trace them are much less abundant. Prior investigations have documented the career advantages teams confer on their members, but not how they influence scientific discovery and technological invention. Here by analyzing teams that fail alongside their successful counterparts across many domains and outcome metrics, this project will uncover empirically-grounded insights regarding why, how, and when teams fail. Without analyzing the many ways in which teams fail, researchers remain unable to identify robust factors associated with success. This project examines team success and failure across a broad array of science and technology-related contexts, ranging from biological, social and natural science and scholarship to technology, software, and entrepreneurship. Teams can be large or small, more or less structurally integrated, and involve distinct combinations of member roles or mixtures of prior experience. The project involves a two-stage research program to understand how successful teams of different sizes and shapes "think differently" and can be designed to accelerate scientific and technological development. First, the project evaluates success and failure outcomes for than 100 million R&D teams over 100 years in terms of team size, network structure, role composition and experience. Second, insights developed from this investigation will enable the launch of large-scale online team experiments to isolate the causal mechanisms driving these effects. These experiments will bring certainty about critical team mechanisms and facilitate recommendations for policy that can be used to design teams optimized for specific purposes in advancing science and technology. Overall, this research promises to dramatically improve our ability to trace, assess, predict, nurture and design high-impact and highly disruptive teams. Specifically, our project first involves (1) massive data cleaning and linkage between data on teams from a variety of domains in science, invention, and entrepreneurship. Then (2) team success and failure is measured at many stages, including the failure to secure funding, publish papers and prosecute patents, inject the frontier with novelty, attract scientific and technical attention, remain robust to replication, and achieve persistent influence. Next, the research (3) analyzes the impact of team size and complexity on success and failure by examining the size, complexity, role structure and diversity of experiences within teams. The project uses insights from this investigation to (4) deploy online team experiments to causally identify the influence of team characteristics on success and failure outcomes. Finally, (5) optimal teams are recommended, as also optimal team alterations or adjustments based on desired science and technology outcomes. Results from this work could influence global science and technology policy by increasing appreciation for the benefits of distinct types of teams -- small and large, simple and complex, diverse and similar -- relative to the science and technology outcomes they support, including disruption and collective advance.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

现代科学技术中最根本和最普遍的变化之一是，随着孤独的研究人员的消失，科学、学术、发明和创业各个领域的团队蓬勃发展。团队构成了推动新发展的社会引擎，在科学和技术领域占据越来越大的主导地位。然而，人们对团队成功和失败的过程知之甚少，因为绝大多数研究都是基于对成功团队的观察和分析。例如，大多数团队研究仅限于最初成功组建的团队，从而导致联合发表或获得专利。在现实中，大多数球队都失败了，有时会以一种壮观的方式失败。这一事实表明，我们目前对团队的理解存在系统性的选择偏差，失败的团队在很大程度上被忽视了，因为追踪他们的数据要丰富得多。之前的调查记录了团队赋予成员的职业优势，但没有记录它们如何影响科学发现和技术发明。在这里，通过分析在许多领域和结果度量中与成功同行一起失败的团队，这个项目将揭示团队失败的原因、方式和时间的经验性见解。如果不分析团队失败的许多方面，研究人员仍然无法确定与成功相关的强大因素。这个项目考察了团队在广泛的科学和技术相关背景下的成功和失败，从生物、社会和自然科学和学术到技术、软件和创业。团队可以是大的，也可以是小的，或多或少在结构上是一体化的，并涉及成员角色的不同组合或先前经验的混合。该项目涉及一个分两个阶段的研究计划，以了解不同规模和形状的成功团队是如何“不同地思考”的，并可以被设计成加速科学和技术发展。首先，该项目从团队规模、网络结构、角色构成和经验等方面评估了100多万个研发团队的成功和失败结果。其次，从这项调查中得出的见解将使大规模在线团队实验的启动成为可能，以隔离驱动这些影响的因果机制。这些实验将为关键的团队机制带来确定性，并促进政策建议，这些政策可用于设计为推进科学和技术的特定目的而优化的团队。总体而言，这项研究承诺极大地提高我们追踪、评估、预测、培育和设计高影响力和高颠覆性团队的能力。具体地说，我们的项目首先涉及(1)大规模数据清理和来自科学、发明和创业领域不同领域的团队之间的数据链接。然后(2)团队的成功和失败在许多阶段被衡量，包括未能获得资金、发表论文和起诉专利、向前沿注入新颖性、吸引科学和技术关注、保持强大的复制能力和实现持续的影响力。接下来，研究(3)通过考察团队规模、复杂性、角色结构和团队内经验的多样性，分析了团队规模和复杂性对成败的影响。该项目利用这次调查的洞察力来(4)部署在线团队实验，以因果关系地确定团队特征对成功和失败结果的影响。最后，(5)推荐最优团队，以及基于期望的科技成果的最优团队变更或调整。这项工作的结果可能会通过增加对不同类型团队--小的和大的、简单的和复杂的、多样化的和相似的--相对于他们支持的科技成果(包括颠覆和集体进步)的好处的认识来影响全球科技政策。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。