It’s long been assumed that the best sorts of innovation happen when smart people work in an environment where spontaneous face-to-face interaction is the norm. Importantly, if that’s true, it implies the widespread transition to more remote work - where spontaneous face-to-face interaction is not possible - poses a threat to innovation. In this podcast, I want to look at a case study for a sector that:

• engages in frontier knowledge work
• has strong incentives to adopt practices that produce better outcomes
• has been well studied
• has increasingly moved to a model of remote collaboration

I am talking, of course, about academia.

This podcast is an audio read through of the (initial version of the) article An example of successful innovation by distributed teams: academia, published on New Things Under the Sun.

Articles Mentioned:
Agrawal, Ajay, John McHale, and Alexander Oettl. 2015. Collaboration, Stars, and the Changing Organization of Science: Evidence from Evolutionary Biology. In The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy, eds. Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin F. Jones, pgs. 75-102. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c13038

Freeman, Richard B., Ina Ganguli, Raviv Murciano-Goroff. 2015. Why and Wherefore of Increased Scientific Collaboration. In The Changing Frontier: Rethinking Science and Innovation Policy, eds. Adam B. Jaffe and Benjamin F. Jones, pgs. 17-48. http://www.nber.org/chapters/c13040

Clancy, Matthew. 2020. The Case for Remote Work. The Entrepreneurs Network Briefing Paper. 

Agrawal, Ajay, John McHale, and Alexander Oettl. 2017. How stars matter: Recruiting and peer effects in evolutionary biology. Research Policy 46(4): 853-867. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2017.02.007

Dubois, Pierre, Jean-Charles Rochet, and Jean-Marc Schlenker. 2014. Productivity and mobility in academic research: evidence from mathematicians. Scientometrics 98: 1669-1701. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-013-1112-7

Waldinger, Fabian. 2012. Peer Effects in Science: Evidence from the Dismissal of Scientists in Nazi Germany. The Review of Economic Studies 79(2): 838-861. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdr029

Waldinger, Fabian. 2016. Bombs, Brains, and Science: The Role of Human and Physical Capital for the Creation of Scientific Knowledge. The Review of Economics and Statistics 98(5): 811-831. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00565

Azoulay, Pierre, Joshua S. Graff Zivin, and Jialan Wang. 2010. Superstar Extinction. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 125(2): 549-589. https://doi.org/10.1162/qjec.2010.125.2.549

Kim, E. Han, Adair Morse, and Luigi Zingales. 2009. Are elite universities losing their competitive edge? Journal of Financial Economics 93(3): 353-381. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfineco.2008.09.007

Head, Keith, Yao Amber Li, and Asier Minondo. 2019. Geography, Ties, and Knowledge Flows: Evidence from Citations in Mathematics. The Review of Economics and Statistics 101(4): 713-727. https://doi.org/10.1162/rest_a_00771

Hellmanzik, Christiane, and Lukas Kuld. 2021. No place like ho