One of the key principles of The Cochrane Collaboration is collaboration. Encouraging international team working helps the achievement of that principle. Some of the other benefits to the organisation are listed below. As you will note, many of these clearly link to The Cochrane Collaboration’s principles.
Common goal – International communication within The Cochrane Collaboration helps to ensure that everyone remains focused on the same goals and objectives.
Keeping up to date – Encouraging individuals to collaborate internationally, rather than working only within their home country, helps the Collaboration ensure that all of its members are sharing knowledge. Access to this wide range of information helps everyone to keep their work up to date and of high quality.
Benefit of others’ experience – Communication between Cochrane members helps to avoid duplication and maximise economy of effort. Having people from different backgrounds working together on projects and reviewing each others’ work helps to minimise bias.
Greater creativity – Research shows that heterogeneous groups are more creative than homogenous groups. Heterogeneous groups tend to consider issues from a broader range of perspectives than homogenous groups and so generate a wider range of ideas.
Continuous improvement – Heterogeneous groups often question each other more than homogenous groups; frequent challenge of the status quo helps to ensure that opportunities for improvement are always considered.
Wider participation – International team working enables those individuals working in countries where Cochrane Collaboration methodologies are new to get support and assistance to help them to promote the Collaboration. Without international team working it would be far more difficult to establish and sustain Cochrane Collaboration activity in these countries. International team working helps us all to better understand the difficulties of promoting Cochrane methodologies within different cultures and countries. Better understanding and sharing of experiences will help the Collaboration to provide appropriate support to individuals and groups. In turn this will help the Collaboration to promote its methodologies worldwide.