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ect ended, the company provided a full graduate assistantship to one of the students to continue the work and hired him when he completed his MBA program. Of the five companies, four adopted the students' suggested solutions successfully, a better suc- cess rate than expected. As a result, instructors in our new Principles of Collaboration course incorporated the protocol into the curriculum, where it is now used to support community service-based learning projects. Benefits of Collaboration In the two years since its founding, ICS has acquired $3.4 million in research grants and formed an inter- national working group to develop practical solutions for collaboration problems in real-world workplaces. ICS faculty find that cross-disciplinary collaboration gives rise to unantici- pated breakthroughs, both theoreti- cal and applied. Business problems have become so complex that a single individual—or discipline—rarely has the expertise or resources to solve them alone. Col- laboration science is a critical new area of research that helps organiza- tions find and implement solutions more quickly. Think tanks like the ICS give faculty opportunities to experiment, while exploring and defining the next generation of col- laboration technologies. Robert Briggs is director of academic affairs, G.J. de Vreede is managing director, Roni Reiter-Palmon is director of research, and Lynn Harland is a senior fellow at the Institute for Collaborative Science at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Research from Duke professors Jack Soll (left) and Rick Larric, shown here sitting in Soll's hybrid Toyota Camry, suggests there may be a better way to post a car's fuel efficiency than in miles per gallon. GPM Better Than MPG? What would help car buyers make more fuel-efficient, environmentally friendly purchases? For a start, post- ing a vehicle's fuel efficiency in "gal- lons per mile" rather than "miles per gallon," say Richard Larrick and Jack Soll, professors of management at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, N.C. Larrick and Soll ran experiments that presented people with a series of car choices in which fuel efficiency was defined in miles per gallon. The researchers found that many people cannot easily identify which option would result in the greatest fuel efficiency. For example, most people believe that an improvement from 34 mpg to 50 mpg would save more gas over 10,000 miles than an improve- ment from 18 to 28 mpg. In reality, the opposite is true: Going from 34 mpg to 50 mpg saves 94 gallons over 10,000 miles, while going from 18 mpg to 28 mpg saves 198 gallons. However, when presented with fuel efficiency in gallons used per 100 miles, consumers are better able to gauge their savings. For example, 18 mpg becomes "5.5 gallons per 100 miles," while 28 mpg becomes "3.6 gallons per 100 miles." Few people realize that "improv- ing fuel efficiency from 10 to 20 mpg is actually a more significant savings than improving from 25 to 50 mpg," Larrick says. The authors recommend that consumer publications and car manufacturers list efficiency in terms of gallons per 10,000 miles driven— already the standard in many coun- tries. The study appeared in the June 20 issue of Science magazine. BizEd SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2008 59