Big teams trend toward incremental innovation

What if the size of a team is inversely correlated with its propensity (or ability) to innovate disruptively? Research suggests that larger teams trend toward incremental (rather than disruptive) innovation.

Data from millions of manuscripts show that, compared with mid-twentieth-century research, that done in the 2000s was much more likely to push science forward incrementally than to veer off in a new direction and render previous work obsolete. Analysis of patents from 1976 to 2010 showed the same trend.[1]

Why is that? There are no easy answers, and there are likely several factors contributing to this, but the authors suggest that one important factor has to do with the increasing prevalence of large research teams:

The drastic change might stem in part from changes in the scientific enterprise. For example, large research teams have become more common, and Wang and his colleagues have found that big teams are more likely to produce incremental than disruptive science.[2]

#innovation #teams

See also:

  1. Kozlov, Max. “‘Disruptive’ Science Has Declined — and No One Knows Why.” Nature 613, no. 7943 (2023): 225–225. https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-04577-5. ↩︎

  2. Ibid. ↩︎