Collaborative Benefits and Coordination Costs: Learning and Capability Development in Science

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/sej.1154
• Date: 01 June 2013
• Author: Linus Dahlander,Gerard George,M. Onal Vural
• Published date: 01 June 2013

COLLABORATIVE BENEFITS AND COORDINATION

COSTS: LEARNING AND CAPABILITY

DEVELOPMENT IN SCIENCE

M. ONAL VURAL,1* LINUS DAHLANDER,2and GERARD GEORGE3

1IE Business School, IE University, Madrid, Spain

2ESMT European School of Management and Technology, Berlin, Germany

3Business School, Imperial College London, London, U.K.

Weexamine the effects of team structure and experience on the impact of inventions produced by

scientific teams. Whereas multidisciplinary, collaborative teams have become the norm in

scientific production, thereare coordination costs commensurate with managing such teams. We

use patent citation analysis to examine the effect of prior collaboration and patenting experience

on invention impact of 282 patents granted in human embryonic stem cell (hESC) researchfrom

1998 to 2010. Our results revealthat team experience outside the domain may be detrimental to

project performance in a setting where the underlying knowledge changes. In stem cell science,

we show that interdepartmental collaboration has a negative effect on invention impact.

Scientific proximity between members of the team has a curvilinear relationship,suggesting that

teams consisting of members with moderate proximity get the highest impact. Weelaborate on

these findings for theories of collaboration and coordination and its implications for radical

scientific discoveries. Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society.

INTRODUCTION

Scientists aspire for breakthrough inventionsthat will

reshape their discipline. An emerging debate to

explain why some breakthrough inventionsemerge is

the role of collaboration and the influence of diverse

scientific backgrounds. Collaboration fosters integra-

tion of skills, ideas, and experiences across individu-

als; it also helps develop new insights through the

recombination of relevant knowledge across sub-

fields.Although scholars have analyzed collaboration

in science, the analysis has primarily focused on the

issues of teamwork dealing with the choice of col-

laboration partners and the trend toward joint

research (Dahlander and McFarland, 2013; Guimera

et al., 2005). This line of thought has established

that there is a trend towardcross-institutional collabo-

rations (Jones, Wuchty, and Uzzi, 2008), as well as

difficulties associated with such collaborations

(Cummings and Kiesler, 2005, 2007; Kotha, George,

and Srikanth, 2013).

Previous studies have shown a positive link

between team-based organization and innovative

performance (Gupta and Wilemon, 1996), but with

limited specificity of its impact on dimensions

of success in innovative projects (Hoegl and

Gemuenden, 2001). The ability of the individuals

taking part in a team to collaborate and the interde-

pendencies among the team’s members, as well as the

diversity and depth of knowledge they bring to the

project, determine the project outcomes (Bercovitz

and Feldman, 2011;Taylor and Greve, 2006).A major

problem with isolating the drivers of success in team-

work stems from the fact that team success depends

on collaborative work of individuals, who bring dif-

ferent sets of knowledge and experience.

Keywords: scientific teams; collaboration; university; inven-

tion; knowledge

*Correspondence to: M. Onal Vural, Business School, IE Uni-

versity, Alvarez de Baena, 4, 28006, Madrid, Spain. E-mail:

Onal.Vural@ie.edu

bs_bs_banner

Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal

Strat. Entrepreneurship J., 7: 122–137 (2013)

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/sej.1154

Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society

In studying the benefits of collaborative work,

scholars have analyzed how team-level learning

takes place when teams adopt disruptive technolo-

gies (Edmondson, Bohmer, and Pisano, 2001) and

how learning and improvisation processes occur in

groups (Miner, Bassoff, and Moorman, 2001).At the

firm level, the benefits of collaboration include

enhanced connectivity to the environment, which

stimulates innovative processes (Powell, Koput, and

Smith-Doerr, 1996). Another literature stream has

focused on the strategic development of collabora-

tive capabilities that describe how firms capture,

disseminate, and manage relationships across orga-

nizational boundaries and how the existence of such

capabilities enhances performance outcomes (Dyer

and Singh, 1998; Kale, Dyer, and Singh, 2002). Not-

withstanding these rich studies, there is limited

research on collaborative projects in scientific

research teams with respect to the development of

collaborative capabilities (Taylor and Greve, 2006;

Tzabbar, 2009) and their attendant coordination

costs (Kiesler and Cummings, 2002).

Although teams have taken a central role in the

generation of knowledge and the development of

inventions (Jones et al., 2008; Wuchty, Jones, and

Uzzi, 2007), the best way to design a team—based on

knowledge context, skills, and experience of indi-

vidual team members and members’ proximity in

scientific and institutional domains—remains a

tangled issue. And the question of organizing teams

that can address potential coordination concerns

while leveraging the benefits of collaborative work

still maintains its importance. This question becomes

even more pronounced when teamwork involves

highly complex and novel approaches to knowledge

generation (Amabile, 1988; Bercovitz and Feldman,

2011), as in the case of scientific discoveries in

emerging fields (Kotha et al., 2013).

This study addresses the question of what factors

influence the effectiveness of teams for scientific

discoveries in emerging fields. We examine inven-

tions and patenting activity in human embryonic

stem cells (hESC), an area of research with the

potential to solve numerous debilitating ailments,

such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and Parkinson’s

disease (McCormick, Owen-Smith, and Scott, 2009;

Scott, McCormick, and Owen-Smith, 2009). Stem

cell research is relevant as a context for this study

because of its emergence as a technical field of study

over the past two decades. Importantly, the cell lines

themselves are fickle material that requires signifi-

cant tacit knowledge on handling and propagation,

which makes experience more relevant for success in

discovery (Jain and George, 2007).

Two factors of theoretical and practical interest

come into play when analyzing teamwork success in

innovative projects: (1) collaboration benefits that

arise from the enhanced ability of team members to

work together effectively and develop routines and

processes, possibly using their previous experiences

with similar tasks as a lens and drawing on the

diverse knowledge of team members to recombine

knowledge for creative solutions; and (2) coordina-

tion costs that emerge as the team seeks to bridge the

institutional, geographic, and scientific gaps across

its members. Thus, collaboration is a double-edged

sword in the context of radical, new science, as it

brings both benefits and costs. Successful collabora-

tions occur when the benefits from collaboration out-

weigh the costs of coordination that team members

face. Hence, in this study, we systematically

examine the effects of prior collaborative experience

and the recombination ability among team members

on invention impact in radical, new science.

The research setting offers an excellent opportu-

nity to study factors affecting collaboration in geo-

graphically and institutionally separated scientific

teams and the impact of their invention outcomes.

Our data cover 12 years of patenting activity since

the discovery of hESC and gives a comprehensive

picture of collaborations in this field. Due to the

recent emergence of the hESC field, the work in this

area is concentrated among 648 scientists and domi-

nated by collaborative work we are able to observe in

our data. From this data, we draw a range of different

variables to assess the effects of experience with a

unique resource, experience in joint work within and

outside the field, as well as team composition

attributes while controlling for patent- and team-

level characteristics.

THEORY AND HYPOTHESES

Generalized experience (experience outside the

hESC domain)

Experience can be thought of having two dimensions

in relation to a given knowledge context: (1) specific

experience, which stems from work done specifi-

cally in the context where the current work is taking

place; or (2) generalized experience, which stems

from work outside the domain of the current knowl-

edge context. Although, scholars havefocused on the

benefits of specific experience (Argote and Epple,

Collaborative Benefits and Coordination Costs 123

Copyright © 2013 Strategic Management Society Strat. Entrepreneurship J.,7: 122–137 (2013)

DOI: 10.1002/sej