Science becomes a team sport
When I was first starting out figuring out “Enterprise 2.0″ (of course, we didn’t call it that yet), I noticed that a lot of the early adopters of web 2.0 tools (mainly wikis) were researchers. For example, Intel has a community called “Intelipedia”, Pfizer has “Pfizerpedia”. Both are mediums for researchers to share knowledge with each other. While speaking to some of these companies, we quickly figured out that the number one reason researchers picked up on these technologies was that there was already a culture of sharing, and direct linkage with how it helps a researcher’s core job function. The culture shock of introducing these tools just wasn’t nearly as big, and there was a clear case for how it made life easier. On the other end of the spectrum, there is a very large insurance company in Canada which released some excellent tools, including a wiki. It sits more or less empty. People just didn’t see the value of it.
This is an interesting article in the WSJ that explains the evolution of how scientists share and collaborate, and quantifies the trend over the last century.
“Once a mostly solitary endeavor, science in the 21st century has become a team sport. Research collaborations are larger, more common, more widely cited and more influential than ever, management studies show. Measured by the number of authors on a published paper, research teams have grown steadily in size and number every year since World War II.
To gauge the rise of team science, management experts at Northwestern University recently analyzed 2.1 million U.S. patents filed since 1975 and all of the 19.9 million research papers archived in the Institute for Scientific Information database. “We looked at the recorded universe of all published papers across all fields, and we found that all fields were moving heavily toward teamwork,” says Northwestern business sociologist Brian Uzzi.”
My takeaway: Much like research, business is a team sport — how effectively organizations are able to collaborate will have a clear linkage to business outcomes.
IMG Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshb/501449588/in/set-72157600222688443/
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