The spatial and institutional factors of knowledge production at MIT

Abstract

Academic research is increasingly cross-disciplinary and collaborative - around the globe and within institutions. In this context, what is the role and relevance of the campus? I examine the scholarly output and collaboration patterns of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as they pertain to its interrelated organizational structures, including institutional affiliation and spatial configuration, over a 10-year time span. There are four significant results: 1. diverging trends in the composition of collaborative teams over time (size, faculty versus non-faculty, etc.) between papers and patents; 2. patterns of cross-building and cross-disciplinary collaboration are substantively different between papers and patents; 3. a network topology and community structure that reveals spatial versus institutional collaboration trends; and 4. a persistent relationship between proximity and collaboration, well fit with an exponential decay model, that is consistent for papers, patents, and for specifically cross-disciplinary work. These insights contribute an architectural dimension to the field of scientometrics, taking a first step toward empirical foundations for applied institutional policy and spatial planning.