How to achieve successful collaborations?

Question

Quite often, at conferences or while attending seminars, I will start an interesting discussion with the speaker, first on-site, then later by email, and even though at some point there seems to be some mutual interest, it almost never gives an actual collaboration (i.e. working on an actual paper).

I have no particular problem of working with different people, so I was wondering if it was quite usual to have this huge ratio of "collaboration failure"? In particular, my problem is that, although it's quite simple to have an idea, it seems quite hard to do the next step, that is to actually work with someone you have no connection, and who might even live in a different country. Are there some techniques to make a "temporary" collaboration work, or at least to detect those which are unlikely to work?

Answer 1

In my experience, starting a collaboration is incredibly easy: you use your network of contacts to identify someone who'd be willing and interested in solving a problem. You talk at a conference or meeting, or arrange a visit to their laboratory.

Maintaining a collaboration, however, is next to impossible. It only works if you have a history of successful results early on, or if you have already had a long history of acquaintance with one another before the collaboration began. (In other words, were you friends or colleagues before the work started?)

Otherwise, I would recommend making sure that you start off with "low-hanging fruit": problems that can be solved mutually within the framework of existing funding on both of your parts, with value for both of you. This is important because one of the challenges of getting grants is that reviewers for funding agencies typically want to see an existing record of collaboration—mutual publications and effort—before they're ready to award money to a new collaborative proposal. There are exceptions to this, but they're by no means common.

After that, you have a track record of working together which will let you grow the collaboration into something further.

Answer 2

IMHO successful and fruitful long term collaborations require at least two important features

• mutual trust
• complementary competences

Trust is essential at various stages of the collaboration: i) you should be happy to make a fool of yourself in front of your collaborators during brainstorming ii) you should be fairly certain that they will pay credit to your own efforts within the collaboration iii) you should be happy to strongly disagree and fight about it without strong feelings for the sake of challenging ideas.

From personal experience (and watching colleagues) it is easier to cultivate and develop trust during your PhD and postdocs while socially interacting with your fellow students and postdocs.

A first advice would then be do not under-estimate extra curricular activities with your colleagues, as they can in fact be the foundation of upcoming shared ideas within long term collaborations.

Complementary skills is key in order to value what your collaborators provide to the collaboration. If your asset is starting papers, you need to find someone who is good at finishing them or vice-versa. It also avoids unnecessary competition within the collaboration. On a more positive note, it sheds distinct light on a research project which is globally useful.

Finally, if possible

• focus on people you can communicate well with: research is about beating about the bush for a long time before seeing the light. Precise understanding speeds things up a bit!

• avoid too large time-zone differences!

  Having said that, I am always amazed how (in contrast to crowds!) collaborators are collectively so much smarter than individually! A difference in perspective is key.

Answer 3

Many times I had e-mail conversations but they never went into a serious collaboration (i.e. ending with a paper). All papers I have are with persons I know from a frequent face-to-face contact (plus with the people they know from frequent face-to-face contact).

Perhaps it has to do with:

• psychological barriers (as also it is easy to have a conversation with a big name on a conference, but much harder to engage in a distant correspondence),
• funding/time issues,
• that collaboration usually requires a lot of contact (sometimes very hand-waving), especially in the beginning,
• with a frequent face-to-face contact it is much easier to gauge others' interest and choose the right persons.

(Entirely anecdotally, as a PhD student with only 7 papers so far. It may not apply to other situations.)