Large Team Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Ideas

The past half-century has seen a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research, to which researchers have responded by lengthening their education and training, specializing more narrowly, and working in teams. A widely held view is that by permitting more specialization and increasing combinatorial novelty, the rise of team collaboration will accelerate scientific innovation. Yet, recent work has challenged this view and shown that solo researchers and small teams consistently disrupt science and technology with fresh ideas and opportunities, while larger teams tend to refine existing ones. This paper has been cited by many follow-up studies on knowledge production and collective innovation due to its novelty and significance in correcting the zeitgeist of our time that views collaboration as an inevitable trend. Yet, very few studies re-examine this paper's main finding-the advantage in the inventive capacity of small teams over large teams, using alternative metrics. Against this background, it is essential to further validate this finding through alternative innovation measures, especially given the debates surrounding the nature and validity of the Disruption index, the main metrics the authors used to quantify and compare the inventive capacity of small and large teams. To do so, we measure disruptive innovation with a variable identifying papers that proposed new scientific concepts and patents introducing new technology codes. We confirm that large teams develop and small teams disrupt both science and technology.