Organizing for innovation: A contingency view on innovative team configuration

Abstract Research Summary While innovation has increasingly become a collaborative effort, there is little consensus in research about what types of team configurations might be the most useful for creating breakthrough innovations. Do teams need to include inventors with knowledge breadth for recombination or do they need inventors with knowledge depth for identifying anomalies? Do teams need overlapping knowledge to integrate insights from diverse areas or does this redundancy hamper innovation by creating inefficiencies? In this article, we offer evidence that the answers to these questions may depend on the characteristics of the technologies. Focusing on the degree of modularity and the breadth of application in patent data, we identify empirical patterns suggesting that differing team configurations are associated with different technological domains. Managerial Summary While innovation has increasingly become a collaborative effort, there is little guidance for managers about how you can construct teams to create novel breakthroughs. Who should be on the team? Some have suggested that inventors should have broad knowledge in order to facilitate the recombination of ideas, which is at the heart of creativity. Others suggest that only deep knowledge in an area can lead to novel solutions. How much diversity in backgrounds is useful? Some find that inventors need to have common knowledge in order to integrate their insights. Others worry that this redundancy will lead to inefficiencies that slow down innovation. In this article, we resolve these conflicting recommendations by showing that the team you pick depends on the type of technology.