The Allen curve was discovered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological education and research.Founded in 1861 in...

 Professor Thomas J. Allen in the late 1970s. It reveals the exponential drop of frequency of communication between engineers as the distance between them increases.

Discovery

During the late 1970s, Allen undertook a project to determine how the distance between engineers’ offices affects the frequency of technical communication between them. The result of that research, produced what is now known as the Allen Curve, revealed that there is a strong negative correlation between physical distance and the frequency of communication between work stations. The finding also revealed the critical distance of 50 meters for weekly technical communication.

This finding was originally documented in Allen’s book, Managing the Flow of Technology.

Recent development

With the fast advancement of internet and sharp drop of telecommunication cost, some wonder the observation of Allen Curve in today's corporate environment. In his recently co-authored book, Allen examined this question and the same still holds true. He says

"For example, rather than finding that the probability of telephone communication increases with distances, as face-to-face probability decays, our data show a decay in the use of all communication media with distance (following a near field rise)." [p. 58]

He further explains

"We do not keep separate sets of people, some of which we communicate in one medium and some by another. The more often we see someone face-to-face, the more likely it is that we will telephone the person or communicate in some other medium." [p. 58]

Significance

With the wide acknowledgment of importance of communication to innovation, Allen Curve has been taught and cited in all management literature about innovation.
In the business world, this principle has had a very strong influence in many areas, such as commercial architecture designs (The Decker Engineering Building in New York, the Steelcase Corporate Development Center in Michigan, and BMWs Research Center in Munich, Germany, Volkswagen assembly and delivery center in Dresden, Germany

), project management
.

External links

• Thomas J. Allen: on MIT ESD on MIT Sloan