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Hi Lukas,

Attached is a small group exercise that I use for teaching about group problem-solving, but I think it could be used as a research tool as well. It's actually based on a story problem from a 4^th grade math textbook and takes about 15 minutes. Teams are given shared general information about the problem, and specific unshared information that is necessary to solve the problem. The stipulations are that they can't write anything down, and although they are free to share their information with other team members verbally, they are not allowed to show them the information. You could probably tweak some aspects of the exercise to fit your research questions. Because knowledge sharing is necessary to solve the problem, performance (accuracy and speed of solving the problem) could be proxies for information sharing. Alternatively, you could record the conversations and code the amount of information sharing.

Another alternative if you can devote an hour to the task is Harvard's Everest simulation. Team members must share information to solve three distinct challenges. You can require teams to use the chat feature for their communications, which provides you a written record of their knowledge sharing, and three opportunities to collect data per team. This task can even be done by geographically distributed teams with a designated team leader advancing the simulation; thus, you could have groups complete the task outside of class or your research space. The link to the simulation is http://cb.hbsp.harvard.edu/cb/web/product_detail.seam?R=2650-HTM-ENG&conversationId=490301&E=11418.

Mike

Michael D. Johnson

Assistant Professor, Management and Organization

Michael G. Foster School of Business

University of Washington

544 Paccar Hall

Box 353226

Seattle, WA, 98195

(206) 616-2756

mdj3@uw.edu

http://faculty.washington.edu/mdj3/mjohnson/