Person: Guinan, Eva
Loading...
Email Address
AA Acceptance Date
Birth Date
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Job Title
Last Name
Guinan
First Name
Eva
Name
Guinan, Eva
3 results
Search Results
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Publication Colocation and Scientific Collaboration: Evidence from a Field Experiment(2012-09-04) Boudreau, Kevin; Ganguli Prokopovych, Ina; Gaule, Patrick; Guinan, Eva; Lakhani, KarimWe present the results of a field experiment conducted within the Harvard Medical School system of hospitals and research centers to understand how colocation impacts the likelihood of scientific collaboration. We introduce exogenous colocation and face-to-face interactions for a random subset of biomedical researchers responding to an opportunity to apply for a research grant. While the overall baseline likelihood of any two researchers collaborating is small, we find that random colocation significantly increases the likelihood of pair-level co-application by almost 70%. The effect of exogenous colocation on subsequent collaboration was greater for previous coauthors, pairs including a woman, and pairs researching similar clinical areas. Our results suggest that matching between scientists may be subject to considerable frictions—even among those in relatively close geographic proximity and in the same organizational system. At the same time, even a brief and focused intervention facilitating face-to-face interactions can provide information that impacts the formation of scientific collaborations.Publication The Novelty Paradox & Bias for Normal Science: Evidence from Randomized Medical Grant Proposal Evaluations(2012-12-06) Boudreau, Kevin; Guinan, Eva; Lakhani, Karim; Riedl, ChristophCentral to any innovation process is the evaluation of proposed projects and allocation of resources. We investigate whether novel research projects, those deviating from existing research paradigms, are treated with a negative bias in expert evaluations. We analyze the results of a peer review process for medical research grant proposals at a leading medical research university, in which we recruited 142 expert university faculty members to evaluate 150 submissions, resulting in 2,130 randomly-assigned proposal-evaluator pair observations. Our results confirm a systematic penalty for novel proposals; a standard deviation increase in novelty drops the expected rank of a proposal by 4.5 percentile points. This discounting is robust to various controls for unobserved proposal quality and alternative explanations. Additional tests suggest information effects rather than strategic effects account for the novelty penalty. Only a minority of the novelty penalty could be related to perceptions of lesser feasibility of novel proposals.Publication Engineering Serendipity: The Role of Cognitive Similarity in Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Production(2019-11) Lane, Jacqueline; Ganguli, Ina; Gaule, Patrick; Guinan, Eva; Lakhani, KarimWe consider how the cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners affects the knowledge-production process, namely knowledge transfer, creation, and diffusion. We theorize that knowledge production is systematically shaped by the field and intellectual similarity between knowledge-sharing partners’ disciplines of study and domain area interests. To estimate relationships, we designed and executed a natural field experiment at a medical symposium, in which exogenous variation was introduced to provide some of the 15,817 scientist pairs with opportunities for serendipitous, face-to-face encounters. Our data include direct observations of interaction patterns collected using sociometric badges, and detailed longitudinal data on the scientists’ publication records for six years following the symposium. We find both cooperative and competitive effects of cognitive similarity on knowledge production. While knowledge sharing increases the transfer of scientific concepts between scientists with some intellectual overlap, it reduces the diffusion of scientific knowledge between scientists from the same field. In contrast, cognitive similarity does not have a direct effect on knowledge creation, but we find that scientists who have initiated early-stage collaborations with one another are more likely to persist and publish together. The findings suggest that some cognitive similarity between knowledge-sharing partners can boost organizational knowledge production, but too much similarity may impede it.