The Lone Genius Loses to the Team October 15, 2007
Posted by keithsawyer in Creative performance, Genius Groups.Tags: citation, creativity, patents, publication, science, teams
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What’s your visual image of a brilliant scientist? A nerdy man in a lab coat, working late in some basement laboratory with beakers and test tubes? Someone typing at a computer in their office? Well, clear your mind of that image, because science today is all about collaboration and teamwork. This is the message of a truly impressive study published in SCIENCE magazine 18 May 2007. Three professors at Northwestern University, Stefan Wuchty, Benjamin F. Jones, and Brian Uzzi, analyzed huge databases–of 19.9 million scientific papers over 50 years, and 2.1 million patents–and found that collaboration is rapidly becoming the norm in science and in invention.
They focused on a few key numbers. First, the databases allowed them to determine which papers, and which patents, had one author, two authors, or more. Two or more authors means that the creation was collaboratively generated. In science, the average team size (number of co-authors) doubled over 45 years–from 1.9 to 3.5 authors per paper. Of course, science has become a lot more complex, and requires a lot more funding, and that might account for the larger team size. But the databases also had data about the social sciences and the arts and humanities; social science research hasn’t increased in scale and cost the same way particle physics and medicine have. And surprisingly, even in the social sciences, collaboration has become a lot more important. In 1955, only 17.5% of social science papers had two or more authors; in 2000, 51.5% of those papers did. And although papers in the arts and humanities still are mostly sole authored (over 90%), the trend over the last 50 years has also been toward more collaboration.
But what about quality and creativity? Can we find out if the collaboratively generated papers are any better? Fortunately, the databases allowed the researchers to determine the impact and influence of each paper, and of each patent, because those databases keep track of how many times the paper or patent was cited by a later publication. More citations means a more influential paper; and more citations have been shown to correlate with research quality. And guess what: over the 50 year period studied, teams generated more highly cited work in every research area, and in every time period. The implication is that teams generate better scientific research than solitary individuals.
One final interesting finding is that the creative advantage for teams has increased over the last 50 years. Although teams generated more highly cited work back in 1955, by 2000 the advantage of teams over sole individuals had become even greater. In 1955, team-authored papers received 1.7 times as many citations as sole authored papers; in 2000, they received 2.1 times as many.
In a later issue of SCIENCE magazine (14 September 2007) several letters challenging this research were published; the authors convincingly responded, by providing additional data. There’s no question that teams do better science than solitary individuals, and that the trend is working in teams’ favor.
I suggest that highly cited works and academic influence have little to do with creativity if you use educator Sir Ken Robinson’s definition of creativity generating ideas that have value.
The Economist this week has a section on innovation. There is a chart in one of the articles (print edition) and at the top is where most ideas come from (employees) and at the bottom is where the fewest ideas come from (academia).
While there are benefits to team development in the sciences, when it comes to the arts, creativity is more likely to be a solitary pursuit (Solitude, Anthony Storr). But even in groups, there is a danger of groupthink, that is, the tend toward conservatism and compliance rather than going out on a limb. Peer pressure is conformity.
Thank you for your response!
The study in question examined not only scientific articles, but also patents, which are not academic in nature. So although I emphasized science in my blog, the findings are broader than that; and, published articles in the arts and humanities have shown the same pattern.
Many studies have shown a high correlation between citation, influence, and creativity (as measured in a variety of ways; almost all such measurements include some notion of “value” which I agree is absolutely critical). The leading researcher in this area is Dean Keith Simonton, of University of California at Davis. The idea that many creative ideas are rejected during the creator’s lifetime is largely a myth.
I completely agree that groups are often less creative than individuals. There’s a lot of research showing this, in fact, and I discuss this in Chapter 4 of my book GROUP GENIUS. But there are techniques you can use to avoid those pitfalls. And according to this new study out of Northwestern, on average groups are in fact more creative than solitary individuals, and the advantage to groups has been increasing over time.
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
There are a lot of complex reasons why our image of the lone genius is so resilient, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that groups are the predominant source of innovation. Say a bit more about why you disagree, and either I’ll turn out to agree with you after all, or I’ll be able to direct you to research that responds to your specific point.
[...] link to a paper in Science stating that the lone scientist is outgunned by teams and collaboration. Keith Sawyer supports this claim and gives more [...]
Some complex projects may need team effort, especially with the constraint of time. Can you imagine a team of artists painting in one canvas? There are social dimentions though that may somehow have some subtle influence but too complex to identify…that the lone genius will continue to have its romantic appeal to most of us.
I agree it’s an appealing romantic image. That’s why lone genius artists keep appearing as stock characters in Hollywood movies. Painting seems to be most resistant to collaboration, but in the visual design world “crowdsourcing” is the trend of the moment–collaboratively generated visual images.