Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas.

Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as facilitators of breakthrough discoveries1-4. Around the world, scientists and inventors are more plentiful and interconnected today than ever before4. However, although there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be reconfigured in new ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder to find5,6-contradicting recombinant growth theory7,8. Here we shed light on this apparent puzzle. Analysing 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications from across the globe over the past half-century, we begin by documenting the rise of remote collaboration across cities, underlining the growing interconnectedness of scientists and inventors globally. We further show that across all fields, periods and team sizes, researchers in these remote teams are consistently less likely to make breakthrough discoveries relative to their on-site counterparts. Creating a dataset that allows us to explore the division of labour in knowledge production within teams and across space, we find that among distributed team members, collaboration centres on late-stage, technical tasks involving more codified knowledge. Yet they are less likely to join forces in conceptual tasks-such as conceiving new ideas and designing research-when knowledge is tacit9. We conclude that despite striking improvements in digital technology in recent years, remote teams are less likely to integrate the knowledge of their members to produce new, disruptive ideas.

Guest authors or ghost inventors? Inventorship and authorship attribution in academic science.

BACKGROUND: Authorship and inventorship are the key attribution rights that contribute to a scientist's reputation and professional achievement. This article discusses the concepts of coinventorship and coauthorship in the legal and sociological literature, as well as journals' publication guidelines and technology transfer offices' recommendations. It discusses also the relative importance of social and legal norms in the allocation of scientific credit. METHOD: This article revises critically the literature on inventorship and authorship in academic science and derives some policy implications on the institutional mechanisms allocating scientific credit. It reports and assesses the recent empirical evidence on the importance of social norms for the attribution of inventorship and authorship in teams of scientists. Finally, it discusses those norms from a social welfare perspective. RESULT: The social norms that regulate the distribution of authorship and inventorship do not reflect exclusively the relative contribution of each team member but also the members' relative seniority or status. In the case of inventorship, such social norms appear to be as important as the legal norms whose respect is often invoked by technology transfer officers. CONCLUSION: Authorship and inventorship appear to be obsolete because they do not capture the increasing division of labor and responsibility typical of contemporary scientific research teams. The informative value of both authorship and inventorship attributions may be much more limited than assumed by recent evaluation exercises.