Revealing the intricate effect of collaboration on innovation.

ABSTRACT: We studied the Japan and U.S. patent records of several decades to demonstrate the effect of collaboration on innovation. We found that statistically inventor teams slightly outperform solo inventors while company teams perform equally well as solo companies. By tracking the performance record of individual teams, we found that inventor teams' performance generally degrades with more repeat collaborations. Though company teams' performance displays strongly bursty behavior, long-term collaboration does not significantly help innovation. To systematically study the effect of repeat collaboration, we defined the repeat collaboration number of a team as the average number of collaborations over all the teammate pairs. We found that mild repeat collaboration improves the performance of Japanes

SUBMITTER: Inoue H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4370822 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature