An interesting article in a recent BusinessWeek (The real reasons you’re working hard) got me thinking about the paradox of democracy and hierarchy in collaboration efforts. The article talks about the increasing time and stress associated with working in a global environment, under extreme time pressures, on innovative projects, etc… One reason, the article notes, is the overload of email and v’mail, and the increasing amount of time spent on communication in the new collaborative environment.

The problem, in a nutshell-to-go is this: Succeeding in today’s economy requires lightning-fast reflexes and the ability to communicate and collaborate across the globe. Coming up with innovative ideas, products, and services means getting people across different divisions and different companies to work together.

Aside from tapping the knowledge of the esteemed John Helferich (of Masterfoods USA) and Rob Cross (of U. of Virgina), the article brings up some very interesting questions regarding the role of collaboration networks in modern organizations. On the one hand, teams that cross functional, geographic, and (sometimes) organizational boundaries have now become crucial tools for organizations responding to opportunities and crises. But are these networks really worth their weight?

Technology has created the means for relatively instantaneous, costless, and place-less communication, enabling us to text-message in the dentist’s chair, teleconference on the drive to work, and email during the Late Show. But the technical infrastructure may not have been the bottleneck. And now, with it gone, the real bottlenecks are hidden under attitudes, expectations, and behaviors regarding how much individual employees should collaborate, with whom, and how.

There are, I’m sure, a long list of these attitudes, expectations, and behaviors–the culture of collaboration in organizations–which is worth exploring in its own post. Here briefly are a few examples:
1. Courtesy: You will respond promptly to any email you receive.
2. Democracy: You should keep everyone in the loop.
3. Diffused Responsibility: CC’ing someone ensures that they have read the message and, without responding, implicitly approved its content.
4. Loyalty: Everyone has time to work with everyone else, and will do so because it’s in the organization’s best interest.
And most importantly,
5. Insensitivity: Collaboration is cost-free.

But is it? There are several interesting insights about collaboration that come from network theory. First is that the number of potential links, or relationships, between nodes in the network (whether people in the organization or webpages on the web) increases exponentially with the number of nodes (n) according to the equation: n(n-1)/2. This means that as the size of teams or other collaborations grows, the number of possible links between members grows–a team of 3 has 3 relationships to manage (3(3-1)/2=3). Add a fourth to the team, and the number of individual relationships doubles to 6. A typical team of 6 has 15 relationships.

Hot Teams
To put this in perspective, let’s say you’re on a team of 6 people (counting everyone who’s contributing or making key decisions) working on a hot project due at the end of the week. On Monday, pressure is low and each person’s emailing inputs at a rate of once per day. That’s only 6 emails going out and, assuming 10 minutes to compose and send, 1 hour in total, or roughly 2% of the 48 manhours (6 people x 8 hrs) worked that day. In the interest of democracy, everyone on the team is cc’d, so those 6 emails get sent to everyone else. At the end of the day, everyone receives 5 emails (30 emails in total), which each take 5 minutes to read. Now we’re at 2.5 hrs of total time spent reading emails, or 3.5 total hours (we’re now at 7% of the workday spent writing or reading email).

The next morning, if everyone responds to 1 out of every 5 emails, then the time spent on email runs steady at 7% (or about 35 minutes a day). That sounds reasonable, even nice. So what happens if we add one more person to the team? By Friday they’re only sending 14 emails, but now receiving almost 90, and spending 9.5 hours (an hour and 20 minutes) or 17% of their time.

So let’s keep the team to 6 people and instead–as with any high performance, consensus-driven, collaborative team–assume they respond to more than just 1 of every 5 messages. What if the response rate goes up to 2 of every 5 messages? Then the time spent doubles every day, from 35 minutes on Monday (7% of the day) to 560 on Friday (117%). How many people, on a hot team, read their email once a day? If we increase to two cycles of mail per day then by Weds, people are spending 9 hrs and 20 minutes before lunch. By Friday, the team is sending itself over 750 emails per hour, receiving over 3800, and spending 2600 hours doing so… No wonder it feels so overwhelming at times.

This is one of the most basic relationships in network theory, and has countless implications. Not the least of which is that the larger the size of any collaborative effort, the more imperative to limit communications and control the culture of collaboration.

Mailstorms
Now, of course this isn’t realistic…not even the most exalted of McKinsey partners gets that many emails in a week. But it does explain why I can be sitting on a teleconference and watch as the inbox on my screen jumps to a couple dozen new messages in less than an hour. I’d propose calling these little email dust-ups Mailstorms (in obvious homage) because they are in fact powerful, rapid whirpools sucking the time right out of your day. The usual culprit is some poor staffer assigned the task of scheduling a meeting with the 6 of us on a project, but it can also be the group’s responses to a proposed memo, or a mass invitation that a small (but now significant) number of people obliviously reply-all to. In any case, as a good citizen I’m obligated to crawl through these personally to catch if anything important (to me) is hidden amongst the verbage.

So what’s the solution? Good question. I suppose it comes down to individual self-monitoring: asking “who really needs this information” every time you add a second addressee to the email. Which in turn depends on the ability to actually make a decision alone, to take responsibility, choke the flow of information, and censor the mails. Democracy only works if we’re not given the responsiblity of participating in it all the time.

Bottom line: Collaboration only works when people already have the ability to think and work independently.

Either that, or pick up the damn phone and call someone instead.

This I wrote as a brief welcome to the new Fellows (doctoral students in the Life Sciences and Engineering) entering the UC Davis Graduate School of Management’s Business Development program:

There is a shared notion that good–no, great–ideas will take the world by storm. This is an unfortunate notion, as history shows us that a great idea often lies dormant for years, if not centuries, before finally being recognized.

Consider Fleming’s 1928 discovery of Penicillin, the antibiotic that saved millions of lives in WW2 and since. The story we tell is of how he accidentally discovered the properties when a culture of staphyloccus was contaminated with mold. But let me tell you another story.

In 1500 BC, written records tell us of the practice of applying mold to infected wounds. Moving forward 3000 years, in the 1860s: Louis Pasteur, notes that mold inhibits the growth of anthrax but decides to work instead on vaccines. In 1871, William Lister finds samples contaminated with mold prevent bacterial growth. In 1874, William Roberts observes the penicillin mold prevents bacterial contamination, but fails to pursue his findings further. In 1897, Ernest Duchesne publishes a doctoral dissertation in which he identifies, refines, and successfully tests–in animal trials–an extract from the penicillin mold.

Finally, in 1928, Fleming publishes an article in which he describes the antibiotic effects of penicillin on staphylococci bacteria. His article sits for a decade until, in 1939, Ernst Chain and Howard Florey find Fleming’s article and build on his work. Their initial success in purifying the drug and testing it in animals and a human ends tragically as their supplies prove too little. In 1941, Florey travels to America (across U-boat infested waters) in search of facilities large enough to grow and process penicillin mold. He finds them in Emeryville, where Chiron now sits. Thus is born the industrial production of penicillin that immediately saves millions of lives in WW2.

The notion that great ideas take the world by storm is a tragic one. It took 3000 years for mold-based antibiotics to take the world by storm, and roughly 50 years from the first animal trials. And this is not the exception. From the discovery of a cure, it took over 150 years for British scientists to successfully cure scurvy by packing citrus fruits on all naval ships. It took almost 75 years for aseptic handwashing to be accepted and implemented in hospitals.

And between Duschenes 1897 dissertation and Florey’s industrial application, 10 million people died during WW1, many from infection.

The unfortunate notion that ideas will take the world by storm is at the core of this program’s vision. Great ideas are nothing without the willingness and ability of those who recognize their potential to make them great. It’s not enough to write a dissertation or publish an article.

To truly make a dent in the universe, you must also bring that idea into the market in ways that do the most good for the most people. That means understanding the importance of the innovation process in moving ideas from the lab into the market, the importance of intellectual property in sharing the value of new ventures, the importance of building communities made up of investors, suppliers, customers and even competitors.

We conceived of and built this program to give doctoral students in science and engineering the knowledge necessary to not only bring their ideas into the world, but to take the world by storm. We expect no less of them.

Apologies to everyone. I spent a few weeks getting this blog up and running and then disappeared for a week. During that time, we were running our first Business Development Intensive workshop–a weeklong introduction to innovation and entrepreneurship for doctoral students in the life sciences and engineering at UC Davis.

Unbeknownst to almost the entire world, UC Davis has one of the largest research communities in the country with over $505M in total research grants and awards. Last year, we were ranked 14th and this year saw a big jump (the comparison rankings aren’t out yet). And yet relative to other institutions with similar research activities have relatively fewer entrepreneurial spin-outs.

Our business development programs are aimed at helping change the ratio of research dollars to new spin-out ventures by giving our students an understanding of what it takes to move from research to the market, whether for-profit or non-profit.

Anyway, learned a lot. Now back to our regularly scheduled programming. Thanks.

A student of innovation, Mikko Ahonen, from the University of Tampere, Finland, is conducting his dissertation research on advancing our understanding of technology brokering. He raises a good point in his blog about where technology brokering–in other words, innovating by recombining existing ideas in new ways and for new audiences–does not explain the innovation process. The danger here, of course, is that a theory that applies everywhere applies nowhere well. But in this case, the question is whether technology brokering explains science. I’ve copied my response below:

I have run into the same questions about whether the processes underlying technology brokering can work outside product development. Namely, how general is the recombinant nature of innovation (the ability to put old ideass together in new and valuable ways) and the ability of people to innovate in thei fields by moving ideas from where they are known to where they are not? Put in these terms, technology brokering seems alive and well in many places where the presumptions of ex nihilo invention and discovery are strong.

Indeed, my reading of cognitive psychologists studying analogical reasoning is that the analogy is not just one way we think, it is the only way we think. We make sense of new experiences only by relating them to our old experiences (or the old experiences of others as shared with us…which is why stories and storytelling is so central to life).

Science is filled with examples of brokering. Coumadin, a successful blood thinner, was adapted from Warfarin, a successful rat poison, which was itself borrowed from a mold in sweet clover that was killing cows in Wisconson. Viagra was a originally developed to treat angina (and now is being explored for cardio-pulmonary indications in children. Indeed, the history of pharma is a history of moving compounds across “disease-worlds.” Only recently has technology given us the hubris to think we can invent new therapeutic molecules.

The real challlenge is social, not theoretical. Science likes politics because politicized diseases or crises can shake loose enormous research grants. But those grants seem to go to the large and established school to be spent in large and established labs focused on large and established research fields. How much is being spent on understanding the next sweet clover mold? And more importantly, how much is being spent to ensure that our understanding of the next sweet clover mold is connected to other fields across “science.”

This is an area where our understanding of the micro-mechanics of innovation (how people come up with new ideas and get them adopted) has enormouse implications for technology and science policy.

A WSJ article (“An iPod Casualty: The Rio Digital-Music Player, 9/1/05” – subscribers only) recently eulogized one of the pioneers of the flash memory mp3 players, Rio, which has just closed down, and mourned for the rest of the pack:

Rio isn’t alone in feeling the sting of Apple’s momentum. In August, Creative Technology reported lower-than-expected sales and a wider loss for the quarter ended in June, and said it was forced to write down the value of unsold inventory. About two-thirds of the Singapore-based company’s revenue comes from its line of Zen music players. Days later, Reigncom Co., the South Korean maker of iRiver players, sharply cut its sales and profit outlook for the rest of the year.

Rio introduced the first portable music player in 1998, three years before Apple introduced their iPod. But alas, Rio created just the player–not the entire constellation of player, music software (iTunes came out 10 months prior to the iPod), online music store (two years later), and legal songs. And Apple’s network has kept growing, with the addition of iPhoto, of Podcasting, and as folks like Cringely are predicting, video by Christmas. According to the WSJ, Apple has 46% of the flash memory player marke and, according to Forbes, 80% of the MP3 player market in total (not to mention 75% of the online music sales).

A century from now, as kids learn about the technological revolutions of the turn of this century, will anyone remember these products? or will they, like the first light bulbs, automobiles, penicillin, etc… get left out of the spotlight? A lot more valuable lessons for would be entrepreneurs and inventors come from these early and unsuccessful attempts than from just looking at the ones that make it. Like the importance of being in the right place at right time; like the value of elegant design (simplicity X functionality); and like the power of a network to overcome individual nodes.