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Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams - EA Forum

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INTRODUCTION This post tries to answer the question of what qualities make some research teams more effective than others. I was particularly interested in learning more about “disruptive” research teams, i.e. research teams that have an outsized impact on (1) the research landscape itself (e.g. by paving the way for new fields or establishing a new paradigm), and/or (2) society at large (e.g. by shaping technology or policy).[1] However, I expect the conclusions to be somewhat relevant for all research teams. Research seems to have become increasingly important within the effective altruism community. In the past few years, GPI was founded, FHI started growing significantly, and Open Phil is expanding its research capacity. Will MacAskill even called effective altruism a “research program”. From this perspective, we should be both interested in creating new fields of research, or at least substantially influencing existing ones, as well as impacting society. Acknowledgments: I did some of the research presented here as part of my work at the Berlin-based Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF), a research group and grantmaker dedicated to preventing suffering in the long-term future. Thanks to Jonas Vollmer, Jan Dirk Capelle, Max Daniel, and Alfredo Parra for valuable comments on an early draft of this post. SUMMARY I looked at the two most comprehensive and rigorous academic studies on productive research teams I could find after a shallow review of the available literature (one literature review, Bland & Ruffin (1992), and one meta-analysis, Hülseger, Anderson & Salgado (2009)). Unfortunately, I could not find similarly comprehensive studies of disruptive research teams in particular. I complemented this with seven case studies of research teams I picked based on my own non-systematic judgment that they have been particularly disruptive. These are the RAND Corporation, the Sante Fe Institute, the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), Bell Labs, Skunk Works, the Los

John_Maxwell 7y 33 0 0 I asked my father, who has spent the past 40 years at Xerox PARC and worked with Bob Taylor, what he thought of this post. He wrote: That all seems reasonable to me. My guess is that the most important factors are great people and a great leader. One of my co-workers, who was involved with starting a research center in France said “A people hire A people. B people hire C people”. So, the first few people that you hire are really important. I think that the main job of the leader is to keep people happy and focused. Most of my managers have been really good leaders. I als

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