Mission

CoLab’s mission is to catalyze and support collaboration science research and education across departments and disciplines at CMU, fostering innovative teamwork solutions that have significant impact on research, practice, and policy. Housed jointly at the Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy and the Tepper School of Business, the Center is a hub for new ideas and insights on collaboration.

Our Approach

The Center supports everything from basic research to more applied work across sectors, and it emphasizes the interplay between real-world problems and theory. 

Advancing this kind of collaboration science requires more than just great ideas—it requires smart infrastructure that supports interdisciplinary research, scale, and visibility. Far too often, interdisciplinary work emerges informally or by chance, and siloed work prevents ideas from reaching their full potential. We’re changing that by creating an institutional hub that actively connects researchers from across disciplines. 

In addition to managing a digital infrastructure designed to connect our community, we host events ranging from research seminars to workshops and mixers to share information and spark feedback, learning, and new interdisciplinary work. 

Philosophy

The Center’s philosophy builds on over a century of research on teams and collaboration, including the work of Center members. We believe three key trends make collaboration more important, and more challenging, than ever.

• A key tenet of organizational design is the need to specialize labor and integrate effort. A trend toward greater professional specialization makes it ever more critical to bring together narrow expertise. But the specialization that offers the potential for cutting-edge insights also generates differences that make collaboration harder to accomplish.
• Technological advancements, from platforms for communicating and sharing knowledge to artificial intelligence, are changing the ways people—and computers—work together. While these new ways of working bring opportunities, they also go against decades of wisdom about how to design teams.
• Organizations face immense volatility, from market shifts to changes in customer desires that can turn on a dime. Smart collaboration requires more than creating engines of execution; it requires an ability to adapt on the fly.

This view reveals that no one academic discipline holds all of the pieces needed to crack the collaboration puzzle alone—we need insights born from interdisciplinary research, where business, psychology, economics, computer science, engineering, and more can come together.