As companies continue to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of remote work, a study of how knowledge flows among academic researchers by Karim Lakhani, Eamon Duede, and colleagues offers lessons for hybrid workplaces. Does in-person work provide more opportunities for innovation than people realize?
The interactions that matter most are not with the people you work with closely every day. Instead, the real influence comes from colleagues whose intellectual pursuits are vastly different from your own, according to the study.
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Leaders have fretted since COVID-19 lockdowns that collaboration and innovation might suffer when teammates interact less. New research points to an emerging concern four years on, as organizations settle into remote, hybrid, and in-person configurations: Potentially fewer opportunities for vital knowledge sharing outside one’s core department.
That is one implication of a new study about how knowledge is shared that focuses on academia, but may offer lessons for technology, pharmaceutical development, and other STEM industries. In-person interactions with diverse intellectual viewpoints in classrooms, labs, dining halls, and elsewhere on campuses have a unique influence on the course of scientific research, according to the study, coauthored by Eamon Duede, a postdoctoral fellow at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard, and Karim Lakhani, the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School.
[This article was provided with permission from Harvard Business School Working Knowledge.]