Study: Proximity Still Matters to Collaboration

By Colleen Flaherty. Face time -- the real kind, not Apple’s version -- still matters, at least when it comes to collaboration among researchers. That’s according to a new study in PLOS ONE. Researchers studied a decade’s worth -- tens of thousands -- of papers and patents affiliated with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and found that cross-disciplinary and interdepartmental collaboration is driven by face-to-face interaction in shared spaces. More...