Related papers: Remote Collaboration Fuses Fewer Breakthrough Idea…
The past half-century has seen a dramatic increase in the scale and complexity of scientific research, to which researchers have responded by dedicating more time to education and training, narrowing their areas of specialization, and…
Over the last four decades, the way knowledge is created in academia has transformed dramatically: research teams have grown larger, scholars draw from ever-wider pools of prior work, and the most influential discoveries increasingly emerge…
New ideas are often thought to arise from recombining existing knowledge. Yet despite rapid publication growth - and expanding opportunities for recombination - scientific breakthroughs remain rare. This gap between productivity and…
The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However, understanding of…
Teams dominate the production of high-impact science and technology. Analyzing teamwork from more than 50 million papers, patents, and software products, 1954-2014, we demonstrate across this period that larger teams developed recent,…
We study how artificial intelligence (AI) affects firms' incentives to pursue incremental versus radical knowledge recombinations. We develop a model of recombinant innovation embedded in a Schumpeterian quality-ladder framework, in which…
The development of inventions is theorized as a process of searching and recombining existing knowledge components. Previous studies under this theory have examined myriad characteristics of recombined knowledge and their performance…
In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute to knowledge creation. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more…
As science transitions from the age of lone geniuses to an era of collaborative teams, the question of whether large teams can sustain the creativity of individuals and continue driving innovation has become increasingly important. Our…
Scientific collaboration is often perceived as a joint global process that involves researchers worldwide, regardless of their place of work and residence. Globalization of science, in this respect, implies that collaboration among…
The vision of AI collaborators is a staple of mythology and science fiction, where artificial agents with special talents assist human partners and teams. In this dream, sophisticated AIs understand nuances of collaboration and human…
While the long-term effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on software professionals and organizations are difficult to predict, it seems likely that working from home, remote-first teams, distributed teams, and hybrid (part-remote/part-office)…
Scientific progress has long been understood as recombinant, with breakthroughs arising when existing ideas are joined in new ways. Empirical work in this tradition has focused on the inputs to discovery, asking whether a paper draws…
We study the Japan and U.S. patent records of several decades to demonstrate the effect of collaboration on innovation. We find that statistically inventor teams slightly outperform solo inventors while company teams perform equally well as…
Team science dominates scientific knowledge production, but what makes academic teams successful? Using temporal data on 25.2 million publications and 31.8 million authors, we propose a novel network-driven approach to identify and study…
In order to create new products, inventors search and combine previous ideas. Few studies have examined the characteristics of search that lead to new products; most have focused on patent citations, which are often retrospective and may…
The COVID-19 pandemic shifted academic collaboration from in-person to remote interactions. This study explores, for the first time, the effects on scientific collaborations and impact of such a shift, comparing research output before,…
Inventor collaborations that span across regions facilitate the combination and diffusion of innovation-related knowledge. While remote partnerships are gaining importance; most R&D cooperations remain embedded in local environments and…
Collaborations are an integral part of scientific research and publishing. In the past, access to large-scale corpora has limited the ways in which questions about collaborations could be investigated. However, with improvements in…
Despite the growing importance of teams in producing innovative and high-impact science and technology, it remains unclear how expertise diversity among team members relates to the originality and impact of the work they produce. Here, we…