Grand opening of the Venture Development Center

Yesterday, Harvard President Faust rode the Red Line to join 200 city, business and education leaders to cut a ribbon and mark the official opening of UMass Boston’s Venture Development Center.

“The state-of-the-art R&D facility and business incubator...signals the Dorchester extension of the innovation, research, and development that occurs along the Red Line,” Faust noted.

Also participating were Chancellor J. Keith Motley, University of Massachusetts, Boston, President Jack Wilson, University of Massachusetts, and Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino.

President Faust's remarks, "Innovation, collaboration and renewal – lessons along the Red Line" are posted on the Harvard University Office of the President's web site.

"The Red Line...is a highly useful reminder of...where we can go … if we commit to working together to get there," she said.

View the entire event on YouTube.

Innovation blossoms where the sectors converge

The celebration of social entrepreneurs and enterprises - reaching a zenith in 2006, when Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank—the pioneers of microfinance—won the Nobel Peace Prize, tends to obscure the mechanisms that result in positive social change—the innovation itself—according to the authors of Rediscovering Social Innovation, an article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review Social.

They think the advantage of examining the pursuit of positive social change through an innovation lens is that this lens is agnostic about the sources of social value. Unlike the terms social entrepreneurship and social enterprise, social innovation transcends sectors, levels of analysis, and methods to discover the processes—the strategies, tactics, and theories of change—that produce lasting impact. Social innovation will certainly require understanding and fostering the conditions that produce solutions to social problems.

The mechanisms of social innovation—the underlying sequence of interactions and events—change as a society and its institutions evolve. Nonprofits, governments, and businesses have had various roles. These social innovations during the 1930’s were driven by a more expansive and direct role of government. The devolution of public services which began in the 1980’s such as day care, nursing homes, even military services to the private and nonprofit sector continues today. Since the 1960’s, pressure on the private sector to consider the social impact of its conduct has grown tremendously.

The authors believe that we increasingly see the three sectors joining forces to tackle the social problems that affect us all based upon a better appreciation of the complexity of global problems such as climate change and poverty. They do so by exchanging ideas and values, shifting relationships, and the integrating private capital with public and philanthropic support.

An example is socially responsible investing which simultaneously considers the social, environmental, and financial consequences of investments, applying the ethos of the nonprofit sector to the most purely financial of decisions: investment.

In principle, many people accept the trend of dissolving sector boundaries; in practice, however, they continue to toil in silos.

The authors say that to support cross-sector collaborations we have to examine policies and practices that impede the flow of ideas, values, capital, and talent across sector boundaries and constrain the roles and relationships among the sectors.

Optimizing multicultural teams

Traditional models of multicultural R&D collaboration fail to draw most effectively on individual team members’ skills and experiences. Jeanne Brett, a professor of dispute resolution and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management, thinks the key to multicultural teams is coexistence of differences and meaningful participation.

In Cultural Intelligence in Global Teams, she explains how she has observed that most multicultural teams collaborate in one of two ways. In the dominant coalition model, there might be a minority group or even a single person who directs the team’s decision making. Brett explains: “We saw how that model shut out certain members of the team who had contributions to make.”

Alternatively, the integration model requires team members to sublimate the identity of their own cultural groups to that of the entire team. However, members might yield some of their their tendency to think differently in the interests of unity.

Brett asserts that the team leader should undertake formal interventions to balance the power equation. Such interventions might encourage more questioning among team members. Alternatively, the leader might appoint individuals or subgroups to work on a particular problem independently and then share their solutions with the entire team.

Brett also believes that one of the ways to get people to participate is to make the size of the groups smaller, and to seed each small group with someone who is likely to support the team member who has not been participating.

To maintain its creativity as its tasks change, the team should continually reconstitute the subgroups.

What makes a successful research team?

The availability of online databases containing millions of papers, as well as analytical tools from network science have turbo-charged studies of collaboration patterns among researchers. These studies typically try to answer the question: "How do you assemble a network and figure out where to plug in your ideas to get the best return?"

A recent article by John Whitfield in Nature summarizes the researchers' tentative tips on what their work reveals:

• If you team up with someone from another institution (of equal or higher tier to your own), the resulting papers are more highly cited than if you team with someone from your own institution.

• If you specialize and work mostly with people in your own field, or you become a big generalist and work with people in a wide range of fields, you get highly cited papers. But in the middle (people who work with an intermediate number of other fields) you get less successful papers.

• In large interdisciplinary groups, the more diverse they were, the less productive they were, but groups where the authors had previous papers together were much more successful than others.

• Large collaborations (say a team of around 20) were more successful if they had a high rate of turnover, but small groups (say 3 to 4) were more successful if they were stable. But stable small groups tend to publish lower impact papers over time.

Research is increasingly collaborative

A recent study at the Kellogg School of Management by Brian Uzzi shows that high impact research is now more likely to arise from large, distributed teams. Published in the journal Science, the study says though that the benefits of this evolution are concentrated largely among the nation’s most elite universities.

The authors examined thirty years worth of the publications tracked by the Institute for Scientific Information’s Web of Science. Multi-school collaborations were relatively rare in 1975. Over the thirty years that followed, multi-school collaborations grew steadily to account for 35 percent of publications in 2005.

The authors found that multi-school collaborations are more likely among the top universities. Lower tier schools, where research isn't cited as often, participated in only 18 percent of multi-school collaborations. Top schools where research is cited more often, participated in 60 percent of multi-school collaborations.

The authors noted that single-author papers have become increasingly rare, down from roughly 30 to 10 percent for science, 60 to 40 percent for social science.

Overcoming barriers to producing multidisciplinary knowledge

Knowledge sharing among researchers within interdisciplinary communities may be critical for new discoveries. In spite of this, biologists tend to talk to biologists, economists tend to talk to economists, and psychologists tend to talk to psychologists. Co-locating them may be a helpful but insufficient step to generating multidisciplinary knowledge. Disciplinary subgroups hold contrary assumptions about the appropriate questions to be asked.

How can this be overcome? Kathleen L. McGinn gives and answer in in “Incompatible Assumptions: Barriers to Producing Multidisciplinary Knowledge in Communities of Scholarship”. A Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, she argues that interdisciplinary communities must first attend to the compatibility of assumptions held by sub-groups within the field. Understanding may stem from the potential for members to recognize the relevance of others' findings to their own scholarship.

In collaborative consortia, relate first, then act

Upfront negotiation regarding roles, resources, governance and so on might interfere with progress in collaborations addressing complex societal issues. So conclude Benyamin Lichtenstein et al., University of Massachusetts Boston, College of Management in Relational Space: Creating a Context for Innovation in Collaborative Consortia.

The authors completed a case study of The Sustainability Consortium – a voluntary association of about a dozen member organizations that have an interest in tackling sustainability. Initially focusing on relationships encouraged a higher degree of innovation in action projects.

In the Sustainability Consortium, it was nearly two years before the first project was clearly articulated. During that time participants met together in three three-day meetings. The focus of attention was the formation of what the authors call “relational space”: face-to-face personal interactions through which participants pursued open inquiry and learning, developed strong peer-based relationships, asked for and received help and support, and inspired each other in a variety of ways. Gradually, problems were articulated and framed, and action projects emerged.