KDI: Multidisciplinary Collaboration

这是一个为期三年的标准奖项。计算和电信领域的最新进展可能会对科学和工业中的多学科合作产生与这些技术在商业组织和家庭中产生的影响一样大的影响。例如，全球网络使创建成员包括生物学家、医学科学家和制药公司经理的项目团队成为可能。这些变化可能得益于更好地理解成功的多学科工作的要求，这些工作往往面临地理和职能距离的问题。功能距离是一个理论概念，指的是由于不同学科或专业的规范、实践和语言的差异而造成的各种合作文化障碍。这项研究将使用各种研究策略(例如访谈、引文分析)来检查学科内部和学科间的合作。一系列实验将测试关于地理和功能距离在想法专有、隐私、信用归因和协作项目生产率中的作用的假设。最后，个人投资促进机构将开发和评价新的计算机应用程序，以创建和支持多学科协作。这项研究解决了社会心理学、社会学、人类学和计算机科学领域的一系列理论问题。对于科学政策来说，描述科学家如何组织他们的工作以应对新技术，以及更广泛地说，说明成功的团队合作和跨越时间、空间以及专业文化和条件的合作所需的技术和管理技术种类，将是重要的。它还将有助于理解多学科工作如何影响科学家和专业人员的职业模式。最后，这项研究将导致开发和测试有助于创建和支持协作的可用的计算机中介通信技术。

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.