Collaboration in R&D

Here’s an unpublished piece I wrote on the topic:

Collaboration in R&D Projects

The special characteristics of R&D projects are featured in the article. The focus is on the influence of academic science structures on collaboration in the R&D context. First, let’s distinguish collaboration from teamwork. It will likely be unsuccessful, for reasons outlined below in more detail, for teamwork to be adopted strongly by R&D project groups. One reason is that US organizations in particular have been force-fitting team concepts that evolved from manufacturing in mass-production environments, to the R&D context. Collaboration, that is, a systematic process of bringing together diverse viewpoints on an issue or problem to reach new insights and action, may provide a great deal of increased knowledge-sharing among R&D scientists, if certain barriers can be overcome.

As we know, the establishment of the individual contributor is the goal used in the training of scientists in the US and most Western cultures. Even many of the published scientific articles that cite numerous authors are not the true results of collaboration. More often, multi-authored articles represent the lab system in universities, where a junior scientist, who does the lion’s share of the research and writing, must include the senior faculty members’ names as authors in every published article until s/he becomes tenured. Often, scientific collaborations consist of two or three persons, and even then individualism is highly valued. The university lab system can lead to a certain passivity in the learning environment. Since science is highly complex and involves very precise measures of “valid” and “invalid” approaches, the young scientist is trained to be passive, to absorb the learning of the scientific experts, and only after completing this training (typically the Ph.D.) is s/he then expected to break out and make new discoveries.

Scientific discovery in the university system is based on the central role of advocacy and debate. New science is created by “defeating” old ideas and assumptions with “paradigm-breaking” discoveries, which are usually generated by the genius of individuals. The role of inquiry is part of the scientific method, but it is not how scientific discoveries are made known.

In the corporate environment, many of these issues carry over from academia. In corporate labs, the disconnects between scientific disciplines are more critical barriers to success than in academia. For example, the schedules of different experiments between biologists and chemists can make for different work schedules, and therefore mean that these knowledge workers do not have informal opportunities to meet. Less time for informal interaction equals less knowledge sharing. Corporations are challenged also with legacy reward systems, again because of the strong influence of academia, which have meant that success is measured in terms of patents and published papers, rather than specific tracking of successful collaborative outcomes.

To return to the issue of teamwork, a study of forty R&D groups showed that cognitive oversimplification often happens among R&D teams and leads to poor project idea formation as measured by failed or canceled projects. The reasons for oversimplification include fear of being wrong; groupthink; having the wrong experts on the team; and poor group processes. The researchers found that the following factors would assist R&D teams to be more effective (emphasis is mine):

• Openness of deliberative norms
• Availability of requisite expertise in the team
• Presence of cognitive diversity of mindsets present in the team
• Presence of shared language among the different technical experts in the team
• External knowledge linkages both with the rest of the organization and outside the professional community
• Project leadership that provided fresh approaches to problems, acted as a sounding board for new ideas, and provided conflict resolution

As we can see in defining collaboration as distinct from teamwork, the study above shows that collaboration may help R&D groups be more effective by focusing on diversity of mindset, shared language, external linkages, and collaborative leaders.

For further information:

“Managing R&D Scientists: Watch for Tribal Concerns,” by Kathleen McGinn Spring http://www.princetoninfo.com/200107/10704s03.html

“Some Contextual Antecedents of Cognitive Over-Simplification Processes in R&D Environments,” by Ram V. Tenkasi. http://www.alba.edu.gr/OKLC2002/Proceedings/pdf_files/ID472.pdf

“Teamwork Strategies for High-Level Managers,” by Andrew J. Brulin http://www.winstonbrill.com/bril001/html/article_index/articles/251-300/article255_body.html

Copyright 2002. Dori Digenti. All rights reserved.