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.

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.

Satisfying two masters

Not a day goes by without seeing a request for proposals from a federal science agency seeking “interdisciplinary efforts to address scientific challenges leading to a new and truly transformative approach.”

Arguably, the most dynamic research at disciplinary frontiers and in novel terrains is interdisciplinary. But you have to defy gravity to achieve it. Because every day, biologists just talk to biologists, economists talk to economists, and psychologists to psychologists.

Even in notably successful interdisciplinary research programs, where there is a concerted effort to integrate of knowledge and modes of thinking, the approval of peers sways assessment. Researchers often are forced to evaluate the degree to which their work is reasonably consistent with antecedent disciplinary knowledge.

This is the conclusion of a paper entitled “Assessing Interdisciplinary Work at the Frontier” by Veronica Boix Mansilla and Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. In their study, they looked at the way in which the quality of interdisciplinary work is determined at exemplary interdisciplinary institutes and programs around the nation.

At the end of the day, success of faculty is tied to disciplinary recognition. Sure, there is a tremendous sense of freedom associated to breaking disciplinary rules, and trying to transform understanding.

But interdisciplinary work takes a lot of effort. A lot of compromises and negotiations are in order. Members of interdisciplinary research programs have to spend time to recognize the relevance of others' findings to their own scholarship.

The authors conclude that interdisciplinary work gains its strength from its keen awareness of the provisional status of its findings. When you are at the cutting edge of anything, by definition you're taking risks that most do not take.

Getting down to the business of creativity

The Venture Development Center team consumes vast quantities of research results that bear on how large unwieldy organizations manage to think and work in new ways to achieve superior performance.

Here are some interesting snippets from Getting Down to the Business of Creativity published on May 14, 2008 by Harvard Business School Working Knowledge. Three faculty members discuss where creativity comes from, how entrepreneurs use it, and why innovation is often a team sport.

"The desire to do something because you find it deeply satisfying and personally challenging inspires the highest levels of creativity, whether it's in the arts, sciences, or business.”

Research demonstrates the causal relationship between emotion and creativity, “with positive emotion tied to higher creativity and negative feelings linked to lower motivation and creativity.”

So what can managers do to promote a healthy, positive work life among employees? A pat on the back is always welcome. But research shows that “people have their best days and do their best work when they are allowed to make progress.”

(This reminds me of one comment universally endorsed that appears in the report of the Research and Graduate Studies Committee during UMass Boston's strategic planning process about reengineering internal business processes to be a tailwind versus a headwind.)

“Maximum diversity in cultures, disciplines, and backgrounds—the intersection where creativity is most likely to occur.”

"In business, people can go only so far by doing things the way they have always been done. In entrepreneurship especially, it is essential to perceive opportunities that others have not, and to pursue them in novel yet appropriate ways at every stage of the game. Such creative solutions will be necessary for managers to help solve the socioeconomic challenges of the future."

"As a manager, you need to create a culture that will convince people to kick off the filters they're used to applying and to think more broadly. It is the shift in the mindset of employees that can prove most difficult."

How the world understands your brand

This is a visual representation of how Google sees the content on our web site. The size and color of each word reflects how frequently it appears in the overall page. Google doesn't care how our site looks. Only the words we use on our site form the online brand. I think we got it right.

These images were generated using a tool at http://wordle.net/.

Basic research, inspired by use

This is an interesting article in The Scientist about Drexel University's new strategic plan. Drexel is among the universities embracing use inspired basic research, which UMass Boston is urged to do in Research Reenvisioned for the 21st Century.

"Drexel University is a comprehensive national research institution in Philadelphia that has grown substantially in the past 10 years...Drexel's new strategic plan expands upon this mission with a commitment to use-inspired, interdisciplinary research that addresses practical solutions to complex societal issues. Drexel's approach to building its research enterprise continues to lead to an increase in the commercialization of technologies that has resulted in their transfer into the public sector to the benefit of society and economic development in Greater Philadelphia.

Fundamental to Drexel's use-inspired research enterprise is the development of expert interdisciplinary teams. Drexel has initiated a process to identify Major Research Initiatives: multidisciplinary programs that research critical issues. As a result, Drexel has initiated Major Research Initiatives in electron plasma medicine, neuroengineering of brain-machine interfaces and the growth of urban centers.

...An urban university, Drexel has also developed an Engineering Cities Initiative that addresses issues related to the massive growth in urban populations and the emergence of megacities with populations of more than 10 million people. This highly interdisciplinary program brings together expertise in civil and environmental engineering, architecture, energy, communications, information systems, public health and healthcare delivery, sustainability, education and policy to address issues related to the quality of life for urban residents...

The Drexel research enterprise is an important component of the educational mission of the University that contributes to the training of the next generation of scientists and engineers. In addition to research training in our master's and Ph.D. graduate programs, undergraduates have ample opportunity to participate in exciting research projects, which encourages them to pursue goals that are important for our national competitiveness in the global economy."

The concept of "use-inspired research" means conducting basic research that maximizes the utility of the work for user-communities. Over the last decade there have been several indicators of interest in a new approach to research along these lines and several fields have coined a variety of terms that refer to this kind of work. What holds them together is a paradigm shift away from a rigid distinction between basic and applied work. The sciences and psychology have primarily drawn on the term translational research, political scientists and economics have used policy relevant research, and education researchers and others have referred to useable knowledge. The term "use-inspired research" is used by the widest number of disciplines and also has been adopted by various national societies and foundations such as AAC&U, Spencer Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, Council on Undergraduate Research, and the National Research Council in material about a vision of research.

An excellent source for a deeper understanding of use-inspired research can be found in Stokes' important book Pasteur's quadrant: Basic science and technological innovation, published in 1997 by the Brookings Institution. Stokes places the issue of use-inspired research in historical and political context while examining the evolving relationship of universities, governments, and other institutions to scientific research.

Solve your problem by giving it away

MathWorks, a provider of software for technical computing and modeling, based in Natick, is running a "wiki-like" programming contest where anyone can look at anyone else's submission and then resubmit it as their own. Through this competitive collaboration MathWorks has found improvements in programming performance.

It's a very counterintuitive way of working. Open up your problem to other people in a systematic way. A problem may reside in one domain of expertise and the solution may reside in another.

People have talked a lot about innovations happening at the intersection of disciplines. So, could this practice in the open source software community work among scientists trying to solve scientific problems?

According to Karim R. Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, systematic evidence is now coming in that shows that broadcasting or introducing problems to outsiders yields effective solutions and quickly. Lakhani’s study shows that enjoyment and the challenge of learning were the strongest motivators for scientists to participate in the process.

Waltham based InnoCentive has put this idea into practice with the help of $6.5 million in financing from Spencer Trask Ventures, a New York-based venture firm.

InnoCentive has built an online community of problem seekers and solvers who collaborate to solve technical issues. The 140,000 registered solvers represent more than 60 different scientific disciplines. Dozens of Fortune 500 companies such Procter & Gamble and Eli Lily pay a fee per challenge posted. When the best solution is rewarded to the solver, InnoCentive receives a commission of 20% or more. The reward for solvers is from $5,000 up to $1,000,000. Seekers find that they can get more work done than their internal research and development departments can handle. Both seekers’ and solvers’ identity are kept confidential and InnoCentive guarantees the protection of intellectual property.

Since 2006, InnoCentive has been in partnership with the Rockefeller Foundation's Accelerating Innovation for Development initiative to find solutions to problems faced in developing countries, for the non-profit sector. For example, Rockefeller is offering $20,000 for a design for a solar-powered wireless router composed of low-cost, readily available hardware and software components.

Any ideas?

A new university strategy: The research cluster

Like UMass Boston (Research Reenvisioned for the 21st Century: Expanding the Reach of Scholarship at the University of Massachusetts Boston), other universities have begun to use the “cluster” approach to organize leading edge research involving multi-disciplinary efforts.

The term “cluster” was popularized by Michael Porter in The Competitive Advantage of Nations (1990). Clusters are geographic areas where there are enough resources and competences to reach a critical threshold, giving it a key position in a given economic activity, with a decisive sustainable competitive advantage over other places, or even world supremacy in that field.


Taking a page from business strategy, research universities seek to build a compelling and differentiated strategy for growth, and therefore reputation, driving it off of core competencies matched with powerful market and competitive insights.

The increasing use of a business model based on market factors to guide university strategic decision making is driven by increased competition for students and research dollars resulting in pressure on universities to market themselves; rising costs of research in the sciences; growing media use of competitive rankings, as indicators of presumed educational quality; and increased costs of operating the university.

But while the use of a business model makes sense for university administrators whose success is directly tied to their performance in the advancing the institution as a whole, success of faculty is tied to disciplinary recognition, not institutional success, as measured in part by the scientific community outside the institution, often resulting in competing priorities.

Nevertheless, there are many faculty members who realize, when they push the limits of their field that they have much more in common with colleagues across the university than with members of their own departments. They also hear from their students that employers want graduates who are prepared to meet the multidisciplinary needs of the world, integrating what they have learned in disparate fields.

To encourage researchers from a wide range of disciplines to collaborate to bring research knowledge to bear on issues of importance, universities have begun to organize research clusters. Oregon State University claims to have coined the term "research cluster." “We're breaking down traditional disciplinary boundaries because we've learned that collaboration creates synergy, excitement, and creativity."



New Mexico State University also claims to be one of the first to use the term. It has established five research clusters to take advantage of strategic opportunities that build on institutional strengths and respond to local, regional, and national needs.


Colorado State University has even trademarked the term "supercluster" to describe a "new model to move research to market."

Clusters are emerging as a way to express distinctiveness, as well as to invest in research growth.

The University of Houston has established six interdisciplinary research clusters designed to enable scholars to better exchange ideas and explore emerging research areas and to work more effectively with industry, other research organizations and the community.

These research clusters are powerful centers of creativity, in which teams of researchers from a wide range of disciplines collaborate across traditional boundaries to bring research knowledge to bear on issues of intellectual, scientific, social, economic, environmental and cultural importance.



The University of Washington has a seed fund to organize research clusters. Their Crossdisciplinary Research Clusters are intended to bring together faculty and graduate students from different departments and disciplines with shared research interests. The university intends to seed new and vital research activity but not provide ongoing support of existing programs. Funds can be used to support meeting costs, photocopying, visiting speakers, etc.

In practice, the key initial challenge in organizing research clusters is to overcome the “either/or” mentality. The question, the university can either invest in clusters or colleges, but not both, is replaced with a “what if/and” question, what if you thought of college and cluster investment as synergistic? By making this shift, the promise of the cluster approach began to become possible.

Pitching sponsors used to seeing results

Are you prepared for the emerging wave of philanthropists who invest in organizations with a sustainable business model and a measurable social impact? Here is a likely dialog reported by the Boston Globe in “Bottom-line philanthropy.”

"You're going to hate me for this, but you've got to listen to yourself on tape. In your initial presentation you said 'um' 33 times."

So said an investment management firm to a nonprofit doing a test run for a funding pitch to a group of potential donors, including investors, government officials, and foundation executives who pick their charities the way they pick stocks: using facts and data.

Modeled after the financing pitches that start-up companies make to venture capital firms, the event by the Social Innovation Forum illustrates a push in the philanthropic community to help nonprofits become more businesslike, understand the language of the private sector, and win the backing of influential, deep-pocketed donors.

"I know it's a little cold, but when I make a decision to support a nonprofit, it's just like an investment for me," said the investment management firm. "I know they're all going to help people, so I want to give my money to someone who will help people three times as efficiently.

Afterward, the not-for-profit presenter confided that he "felt nervous the whole time." But he was grateful for the straight talk, he said. "It was really refreshing to have somebody be fully honest with me, especially a person who's coming from a very professional and effective background."

The VDC plays this role at UMass Boston, helping researchers figure out how to better present their work so that people understand the need they're trying to address and how the work they're doing is effective.

Understanding each other

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, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, 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.

The modern entrepreneurial university and its community

How do public research universities express their connection to the community they serve? My favorite is Arizona State University’s New American University statement. Everyone who is doing research is invited to pursue ideas that create new value.

“ASU has a vision to be a New American University, promoting excellence in its research and among its students, faculty and staff, increasing access to its educational resources and working with communities to positively impact social and economic development.

“ASU believes that you should measure the value of research by the impact it has on society. ASU encourages its scholars to pursue research that will impact society, conduct that research in a way that recognizes its potential impact, and share it with people in a way for it to make that impact. This idea shapes one of ASU’s goals: whatever the research encompasses, the university will measure success by looking at the ways in which that research has changed patterns in society. This could be a social scientist figuring out how to help politicians make better decisions. Or it could be a bioengineer working to make a cancer vaccine. Whatever the topic, the goal is: impact.”

That's inspiring to academic community members with exciting new concepts that have never considered that their concepts could result in a commercialized product. If we nurture new venture creation based on our teaching and research successes, we tap a vast resource that could be used for the betterment of our supporting communities.

The journal article “Creation of an Entrepreneurial University Culture” chronicles how one university focused on four elements that significantly contributed to a change in their entrepreneurial culture:

1. Establishment of a technology business incubator

2. Establishment of centers of coordinated research activities

3. Establishment of entrepreneurial elements in degree curricula

4. Establishment of research linkages to businesses

Creation of an entrepreneurial culture in a university environment is a complex task that requires the efforts of many dedicated individuals. These individuals are located in industry, academe, and government, and often are only loosely coordinated in their activities with one another. But they all share a common passion to provide new and expanded opportunities for the community.

Make the leap from good to great

According to the Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." If you want your research program to have impact, then you must think like a hedgehog, according to Jim Collins (Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t). Collins makes the case that what separates those who make the biggest impact from all the others who are just as smart is that they’re hedgehogs. Hedgehogs see what is essential, and ignore the rest.

Collins of course thinks it is possible for any program or organization to make the leap from fox to hedgehog. The strategy is based on deep understanding of three intersecting circles: 1) what you are deeply passionate about, 2) what you can be the best in the world at, and 3) what best drives your economic engine.