So does this mean we no longer need to see each other in person? Is the distance dead? Not when it comes to collaborative learning, he says Hyejin Younassociate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School.
Analyzing more than 17 million scientific publications over the past 45 years, Youn and Frank van der Wouden of the University of Hong Kong found that researchers who collaborated locally were much more likely to gain new knowledge from their teammates than those who collaborated remotely.
That’s because being physically together—reading body language, looking at a problem on a whiteboard, and working together to use specialized lab equipment—is especially valuable when knowledge isn’t yet codified.
“We learn more from each other in person than we think we do,” says Youn. “That’s part of our success as humans, especially when it comes to knowledge that’s new, not yet defined. You must be present to watch and learn. And local collaboration is the way to do that.”
How collaborations lead to new knowledge
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, the geographic distance between people and organizations seemed increasingly irrelevant. Advances in communication and transportation technologies seemed to flatten the world and workers in both academic community and industry found that collaboration and knowledge transfer could be successfully carried out across institutional and international boundaries.
But Youn wasn’t convinced that remote collaboration was the perfect substitute for being in the same room together. Why, then, was it knowledge and innovation still largely concentrated in urban cities? Why was business travel still so popular? These trends seem to suggest that knowledge creation and transfer may benefit from cohesion.
So, to study the effect of geography on peer learning, Youn teamed up with van der Wouden, then a Kellogg postdoctoral fellow, to study whether and how knowledge production depended on physical proximity.
The pair analyzed data from the Microsoft Academic Graph that included information on millions of academic publications from authors who published their work between 1975 and 2018.
Youn and van der Wouden wanted to identify scholars who had gained new knowledge from their previous collaborations. A good proxy for this, they realized, was research in a new field: someone who began their career in one academic discipline (materials science, for example), then collaborated with authors from another discipline (chemistry), and eventually published a paper in this new field (chemistry) as sole author. This seemed like a relatively simple proof that the scholar had learned from their previous collaboration. Although single-author academic papers are rare in many disciplines, the team still found 1.7 million authors who met this criterion.
They then determined the geographic locations of those 1.7 million authors and their collaborators, down to the location of the author’s building. (For example, if the author was listed as being from the psychology department at Harvard University, the building housing the psychology department was considered their location.) Collaborations were considered local if the authors were less than 700 meters apart, approximately 10 minutes by car. the legs.
They also analyzed the authors’ career stage, their institution’s ranking, and the number of authors in their group publications.
To investigate whether the scholars learned from their partners, the team calculated a learning rate. This rate—the proportion of scholars who first collaborated with scholars in a new field and later published a paper in that field—was calculated for local and non-collaborations in each academic discipline.
The team also calculated the learning premium for local versus non-local cooperation. For example, if a field had a local learning rate of 10 percent and a distance learning rate of 5 percent, it would indicate that scholars collaborating locally were twice as likely to learn from that collaboration.
Who has the most to gain from local partnerships?
Youn and van der Wouden found that local collaboration among the scholars they studied had declined significantly over time—from 75 percent of collaborations in 1975 to 60 percent in 2015. Over the same period, the average geographic distance between partners doubled to almost 2,000 kilometers.
“Thanks to technology, we collaborate over long distances even more now,” Youn said. But this accessibility comes at a cost. “The longer the distance between partners, the less likely you are to learn from each other,” he says.
Indeed, across all academic disciplines, the rate of learning was greater for local collaborations than for long-distance collaborations.
However, the percentage was not the same between branches. In fields such as history and political science, distance had a negative impact on learning, but a small one.
But researchers in science and engineering were much more influenced by distance. Geologists, for example, had a great deal of learning from local collaborations. And geographic distance hurt scientists in chemistry, materials science, and engineering the most. Their learning rate was much lower in non-local partnerships, perhaps because these fields rely more on instruments and equipment that require personal collaboration.
And today, scholars have even more to gain from local collaboration. The learning premium from local collaboration has grown from 50 percent in 1975 to 85 percent in 2015, the team estimated.
Some scholars had the most to gain from local collaborations, the analysis found, including those in the early stages of their careers and those at lower-ranked institutions.
“That’s understandable, because early in your career, you still have to acquire knowledge, and you have to be present to do that when the knowledge isn’t codified yet,” Youn says. “It’s like riding a bike. You can’t learn to ride a bike by reading a paper.”
Work from home; Not if you want to learn from colleagues.
Of course, the world has changed since the most recent work on the dataset was published in 2018. Now, meetings via Zoom and Microsoft Teams are much more common, even among local partners. And while working remotely once seemed like a temporary residency, many companies are adapting to a new reality in which employees are required to work from home, at least part of the time. So how will this affect learning in the future?
People who work from home may be missing out on opportunities to expand their expertise, which could have career implications, both in the short term and in the future. “It could lead to knowledge inequality and segregation,” says Youn. “Especially if you’re early in your career. You may miss out on collaborative learning opportunities that could ultimately benefit your career.”
Too much remote work could also have greater effects on innovation, which often results from teams sharing ideas. “If you want to be innovative, if you want to collaborate and learn from each other at the cutting edge,” Youn says, “you have to be personal.”
This does not mean that all cooperation must be local. Learning can be done at a distance, as Youn found when her co-author van der Wouden was hired as a professor at the University of Hong Kong toward the end of this research. However, Youn says, Zoom calls were difficult to coordinate and “were not the same as in-person collaboration.” And he believes that if the move had been made earlier, while they were thinking about key concepts and ideas, the challenges would have been much greater.
Youn suggests companies find the right mix of workers from home, where they can be productive, and bringing them into the office, where they can collaborate to create new knowledge. Companies focused on innovation should be especially careful to find the right balance. Companies looking to expand their knowledge portfolio should also look for offices in areas where that knowledge resides, such as Silicon Valley for technology or Washington, DC, for government.
“Bring people together so they can exchange ideas face-to-face,” says Youn. “We’re incredibly good at learning from each other, especially in those dark ways that can lead to innovation.”
