Researchers from Northwestern University studied creative successes in the arts and sciences to determine the ingredients of a good team. From Broadway to breakthrough scientific journal papers, the key is fresh blood:
"Do people go out of their way to collaborate with new people?" said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and the corresponding author on the paper. "Do they take this risk?
"We found that teams that achieved success — by producing musicals on Broadway or publishing academic papers in good journals — were fundamentally assembled in the same way, by bringing in some experienced people who had not worked together before. The unsuccessful teams repeated the same collaborations over and over again…"
"The entire network looks different when you compare a successful team with an unsuccessful team," said Amaral. "The teams that publish in bad journals form a network broken into small, unconnected clusters while the teams that publish in good journals give rise to a giant, connected cluster. A strong correlation clearly exists between team assembly and the quality of the team's creations. You need someone new to get the creative juices going so you don't get trapped in the same ideas over and over again."
