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Public agencies are applying the principles of crowdsourcing to new tech design projects in efforts to both reduce the costs of government procurement and to gain access to the best ideas. The 2013 winners of the drive-train element of the US's DARPA FANG Challenge were a team of three who had never met before collaborating on their proposal ( link ). Refs: DARPA Vehicle Forge: ( link )

Categories to consider: Skills Cost IT Infrastructure Risk Quality Local market Economy Location (geographic) Culture Political For country E. Issues: Cultural-politics Unhelpful govt. attitude to business Climate Time zone (wrt North America) Risk of disruptive events Corruption Illiteracy rate Education system Inconsistent IT capabilities in different cities Positives: Skilled labour force, multi-lingual Low cost Smart village initiative Workers willing to work overtime World class telecommunications infrastructure (where it is available) Access to Europe, Middle East, North Africa Easy business environment Timezone same as some major markets Gateway to Middle East Tax breaks in special hub zones.

Exercise: Establish the level of knowledge and experience of virtual teams and their supporting tool-technology combinations among the survey group. The following survey is an adaptation of the one carried out by the Economist Intelligence Unit in the report " Managing virtual teams Taking a more strategic approach " from 2009. Click here to take survey

In early 2013 Yahoo hit the tech headlines by changing its workplace policy and placing a ban on teleworking ( link ). On the other hand the 2013 winners of the DARPA FANG Challenge were a team of three who had never met before collaborating on their proposal ( link ). Do virtual teams perform better or worse than collocated teams, or what about teams that meet intermittently or partially? This is a really interesting question. On the one hand common knowledge understanding (and research) overwhelmingly states that face to face contact is an essential component for effective distributed teamwork. On the other hand, a narrowly focused and relatively sparse body of research has highlighted a number of cases where high performance, multidisciplinary, virtual teams completely outperform in-house teams e.g. (Malhotra, 2001). J. Mike Smith has also noted the experiences in pharmaceutical R&D projects, where small, distributed, virtual, multidisciplinary teams exceed the performa...