Drones hold promise for supporting emergency services, but their integration into workflows remains ad hoc and coordination-intensive. This paper addresses two research questions: how emergency teams want to collaborate with drones, and how to formalize these collaborations into repeatable processes. Based on four field trials and 95 interviews, we derive 44 interaction patterns grouped into 10 meta-patterns reflecting operational needs such as reconnaissance, communication, and logistical support. To structure these practices, we introduce DroneLets - a new class of design artifacts that extend Collaboration Engineering to embodied agents. DroneLets capture setup requirements, drone capabilities, environmental constraints, and coordinated actions across human and drone actors. They offer a modular framework for designing repeatable, scalable collaboration processes in emergency services, illustrated through patterns such as broadcasting to bystanders and post-fire monitoring. This work expands the scope of CE and provides a structured foundation for integrating autonomous drones into high-stakes field operations.
This study examines how ride-hailing services affect localized knowledge flows among firms. Leveraging the staggered entry of Uber and Lyft across U.S. counties, we construct a panel dataset of within-city patent citations to measure interfirm knowledge flows. Using a difference-indifferences design, we find that the entry of ride-hailing services significantly increases local knowledge flows. Mechanism analyses using county-level traffic data and micro-level mobility data suggest that this effect operates through improved urban mobility: the entry of ride-hailing increases local traffic flows and facilitates opportunities for interactions across organizational boundaries. Consistent with this mechanism, we observe that the effect is stronger for firms that experience greater travel-time savings when using car-based transportation. Additional analyses show that ride-hailing entry disproportionately benefits firms with lower prior innovation output and fosters collaborative innovation. Overall, our findings indicate that, unlike physical infrastructure that creates new transportation links or relocates firms, ride-hailing platforms foster localized knowledge exchange and innovation by improving the use of existing urban transportation networks and enabling interpersonal interactions among geographically separated firms.
