Resumo.
When I was invited to submit an article to this spotlight on collaboration, the first question I asked was whether the other contributors and I would have the chance to interact and perhaps integrate our ideas on the topic. I knew that Harvard Business Review was deeply rooted in a scholarly tradition—and that worried me. Academic collaboration, I’ve learned over the years, is something of an oxymoron. More often than not, what is described by that term is really non-collaborative, or worse, pseudo-collaborative work, driven by the long-standing rituals of institutional seniority and the professional and financial incentives to build higher silos with thicker walls. That’s a shame since it is our universities that are supposed to have the intellectual force and license to find bold solutions to important problems. On the bright side, there’s an extraordinary opportunity for those of us nonacademics who, unconstrained by those customs, see value in getting silos to collide.