Bachelor Thesis, Master Thesis or Project Study
📌 Key facts
Contents
💡 Background
Collective intelligence includes a group's capability to collaborate and coordinate effectively, and this is often much more important for group performance than individual ability alone. There is a stream of research, driven by the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence, which focuses on the interaction between people in teams and their interactions with machines. It researches how teams can be most effective, or in other words how their collective intelligence is the highest. We want you to add to this research stream and generate new insights on successful teams.
- How do individual talents form exceptional teams?
- How can humans and machines work together to achieve high collective intelligence?
- How can one measure the intelligence of groups and teams?
- What differentiates successful teams from the rest?
- Can successes of teams be replicated in different companies?
🦾Who We Are
The Chair for Strategy and Organization is focused on doing research with impact. This means we do not want to repeat old ideas and base our research solely on the research people did 10 years ago. Instead, we currently research topics that will shape the future. Topics such as Agile Organizations and Digital Disruption, Blockchain Technology, Creativity and Innovation, Digital Transformation and Business Model Innovation, Diversity, Education: Education Technology and Performance Management, HRTech, Leadership and Teams. We are always early in noticing trends, technologies, strategies and organizations that shape the future, which has its ups and downs.
🎯 Goals
- Review current literature on collective intelligence, team performance, and human-machine interaction
- Identify teams with high success
- Extract best practices from work to successful teams/organizations
- Create a framework, concept, or guide for teams to be successful
🎓 Profile
- Reliable and self-driven
- Enthusiasm for Human-computer interaction / productivity / analytics / teamwork
- Ability to do sophisticated internet, desk research, and connect with practitioners
- Passion to learn more about the future and do research with impact
📚 Further Reading
Malone, T. W. (2004). The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style, and Your Life. Harvard Business Review Press.
Malone, T. W. (2015). Handbook of Collective Intelligence Hardcover. The MIT Press.
Woolley, Anita & Aggarwal, Ishani & Malone, Thomas. (2015). Collective Intelligence in Teams and Organizations.
📄 Requirements to any Work
We do not want your research to gather dust in some corner of a bookshelf but make it accessible to the world. Thus, we warmly encourage you to create some or all of the following:
- Infograph - visually represent some of your work (find examples here)
- Slide Deck - summarize your research and possibly present it
- Extract most important sequences from podcasts, videos, and other media
- 3-4 Tweets about the most important findings and summarizing the topic
- optional: Medium Article - let people outside university know about your research and start your personal brand
📬 How to Apply
If you are interested, please contact Prof. Dr. Isabell Welpe (e-mail below) by submitting your CV and grade report. Please also briefly outline your tentative research idea (research question, data and methods, possible outcomes with a tentative outline all in word as *.docx)
We're greatly looking forward to hearing more about you!