Where do you get your ideas?

There is a huge literature on this, usually called “microgeography”. Even small changes in physical distance between potential coauthors (like, on different floors of the same building) cause huge changes in the probability they work together (e.g., https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/pdf/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2798 and the lit cited therein). Bell Labs famously designed their building to ensure people from different groups were forced to bump into each other on the way to lunch or the parking lot, a decision that paid many Nobels as a dividend. In the patent and scientometrics lit, it is very clear that physical co-location is incredibly important for knowledge transfer and collaboration within firms. Within larger geographies, “disembodied” knowledge spillovers from one lab in a city to a different lab or firm are much more likely to happen if the latter is in the same city.

I think most of my ideas were solitary, but most of them were bad. I could shoot down a lot of the bad ones myself, but I often needed an outside executioner. (My darlings!) There was nothing as effective as frog marching the idea down the corridor and exposing it to a colleague.

Whoops! That’s Dean of Arts and Humanities, not Arts and Sciences.

Looking at my own co-authored work:

I have multiple papers published and in various stages of progress with one co-author, which started with a conversation at a bar at a conference. I haven’t yet had similar success with Zoom happy hours after online conferences, but it’s also true that no other physically embodied interaction has turned out to be as productive.

I have two other co-authorships in progress, one of which arose from a serendipitous conversation at a physical conference (we hadn’t seen each other since undergrad and had gone on to academic careers in different disciplines, but realized we had something similar to say about the Axiom of Choice) and one of which arose from an e-mail (and while I had read some of his work before, I actually can’t recall if we have ever met in person).

I have a four-author paper that arose from a physical reading group that I joined because it was at another university in the same city as me. I haven’t yet had similar co-authorship arise from virtual reading groups, but again, I’ve been in a lot of physical reading groups that didn’t lead to this sort of collaboration either.

I have three co-authored papers with my PhD advisor, all written years after I graduated (one of which involves two other authors as well, one who had been in my graduate program at the same time and the other of whom had been a regular at the same conferences as us). I assume these collaborations would have worked fairly similarly if my graduate education had occurred mostly through online means, though it’s hard to say whether relationships with fellow grad students and fellow conference-goers would be the same.

I also have two early co-authorships that arose entirely because of a blogpost or e-mail I wrote and were conducted entirely online (one of those co-authors I believe I have only met in person once, very briefly).

So in my own experience, it seems that physical proximity was important for a few of the collaborations, but not quite as high a proportion as I would have expected!

It’s a bit harder to say about all the smaller interactions that improve a paper but don’t promote someone to co-author. I’m fairly confident that a large fraction of those are from physical proximity (membership in local reading groups that are only partly based on research interests and more strongly based on being in commute distance of each other), though another large fraction are from questions in official conference or seminar talks that would have happened similarly through online means. I expect that most of the professional relationships that have strongly influenced my work were originally nurtured through repeated informal physical interactions either in the same department, or at physical events in the same city, or at para-conference events like dinner, drinks, and the like.

But there definitely are also a growing number that are initially nurtured through the kind of serendipitous repeated small interactions on social media.

(I’m very much of the school that thinks that urban geography and building microgeography are major factors, but I’m also interested in the ways that virtual interactions create their own geography-like conditions, and appreciate this excuse to introspect about my own past.)

It would be very interesting, in about ten years, to compare the genesis of academic and professional collaboration from, say, 2015-2019, with the genesis of that collaboration from 2020 t0 2024. I think the response to the pandemic is creating a discontinuity that might provide some valuable insight into the microgeography problem.

As things currently stand, my sense is that a great deal of confirmation bias is at work in people’s arguments. But if you saw a marked fall off in research output (however measured) from jurisdictions that failed to control the pandemic as compared to those with greater success, that would be powerful.

I suggest taking a look at AnnaLee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage (1996), which argues that the shift of digital innovation from Route 128 (around Boston) to Silicon Valley came in good part because the hierarchical East Coast organizations didn’t support social interactions among people in different companies, which turned out to be vital for the spread of ideas in Silicon Valley. This account of the importance of human connection to develop and spread ideas still helps explain why Silicon Valley companies put so much money into their campuses and bringing people together despite their claims that the technology they produce makes distance irrelevant.