Spotlight on Wietske Van Osch’s research in MIT Sloan Management Review

A knowledge transfer article co-authored by Wietske Van Osch, Associate Professor in the Department of Information Technologies, was chosen as the media feature piece in MIT Sloan Management Review’s Fall 2023 issue.

MIT Sloan Management Review is a research-based magazine for business executives. It is published by the MIT Sloan School of Management, the business school of the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

This selection is a tribute to the quality and relevance of the research conducted by Ms. Van Osch and her co-author Burcu Bulgurcu. It will also ensure increased visibility for their article in the American media.

Transparency vs. privacy

This paper sets out the issues raised, and the conclusions obtained by the researchers in a research project on digital collaboration tools in companies. In this project, they studied communications between staff members of a large manufacturing company, within 215 different groups using a digital collaboration platform.

Research shows that by simply identifying how to use these tools, managers can make collaboration more productive and more suitable for the desired type of creativity or innovation.

The creative outcomes will differ, depending on whether the digital collaboration structure focuses on transparency (public collaboration groups) or on privacy (private collaboration groups). So, in the first case, creativity will be developmental and therefore more adapted to solving a problem using improvements or modifications. In the second case, we will obtain disruptive creativity, which is better suited to the development of a completely new project or a redesign.