Do larger teams produce more innovative ideas?

Many of us intuitively think so. After all, more people, more ideas, more innovation—right?

Not exactly, Dashun Wang explained at The Atlantic Progress Summit, held last week. The real answer, he said, turns out to be a good old-fashioned “it depends.” In science and technology, if you’re looking to build on ideas that are already out there, a large research team might be just the thing. But “for the ones who are really trying to move the needle, you want to actually shrink the team to start with,” he said. (You can see the entire conversation here; Wang was joined at the event by fellow Kellogg professor Benjamin F. Jones.)

Wang got interested in the relationship between research team size and innovation after noticing the Nobel Prize–winning paper on the discovery of gravitational waves contained a peculiar sort of appendix: nearly three pages of small print, alphabetically listing the names of the paper’s more than 1,000 coauthors.

That paper, from 2016, is a fine example of a well-documented shift taking place across science and technology—research teams are becoming larger, while solo and small-team projects are becoming rarer.

No doubt, those larger teams have made important achievements. But Wang was hesitant to conclude that huge gaggles of researchers simply produce better work. After all, the groundbreaking physics paper on gravitational waves has its earliest roots in the theory of general relativity, first proposed in 1915. “How many authors were on that paper?” Wang asks. “Just one—Einstein himself.”

In a 2019 study, Wang and his coauthors analyzed the citation patterns of 50 million papers, patents, and software products developed between 1954 and 2014. They found that large-team projects indeed garner more citations and accumulate them faster. But these large teams primarily develop upon existing research, rather than proposing new directions. Meanwhile, small teams tend to forge entirely new paths of discovery.

Wang’s analysis showed that large and small research teams produce works of a fundamentally different character. While large teams receive more citations overall, one- or two-person teams produce work that is much more disruptive.

As teams gain a third or fourth member, however, their disruptive potential begins to fall. By the time they reach five members, their likelihood of being highly disruptive has plummeted—and it continues to drop as the team keeps growing.

This finding is consistent with research on teamwork in the private sector, says Wang. Management experts have observed that small, agile teams are more likely to develop a novel or experimental idea. “Then, if it actually works, you can expand it to the entire company,” he says.

So why are small teams able to break new ground? Wang thinks it’s because truly innovative research often comes with the risk that the project will fail. In order to take a project in such a risky direction, every member of the team must be on board—which becomes more difficult as a team gets larger.

While Wang, a physicist by training, admires the gravitational-waves project and other critical developmental research, he says that his findings underscore the importance of also funding smaller teams, which he calls “brave and broke.”

Solo authors, duos, and trios need support. “Otherwise,” he says, “there’s not going to be the small teams that give you the disruptive idea for large teams to develop.”

You can read more about the research in Kellogg Insight.