A recent analysis of 20 million research articles and 4 million patent applications found that distributed teams are less likely to have a breakthrough discovery than their on-site counterparts. They found that collaboration for remote teams was more likely to happen at later stages where technical tasks are more discreet rather than earlier during the ideation stage. The authors believe that this means remote teams fail to benefit from the shared knowledge of the team and therefore have less new, disruptive ideas.
Read Remote collaboration fuses fewer breakthrough ideas.
See also:
- Remote work creates fewer weak ties which is important for chance encounters and sharing knowledge
- Working in person matters at the beginning of a project
- Organizational support of remote work correlates with reported productivity