When small teams are better than big ones

summary

One of the most universal changes in the innovation sector in recent years has been the growth of large teams in all areas of research and development, while solitary inventors, researchers and small teams have all declined. This fundamental change is crucial for science and innovation policy, because it refers to large teams as the optimal drivers for the greatest breakthroughs of the future.

But do large and small teams differ by type of innovation? This is what the researchers wanted to test. They examined millions of articles, patents and software projects and found that while large teams are progressing and developing science, small teams are essential to disrupt it – a discovery that has broad implications for science and innovation.

The "discovery of 21^st century "was awarded the Nobel Prize two years after its manufacture. In 2015, the LIGO project (Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory) finally detected the reasons why it had been built: gravitational waves – ripples in the structure of space and time – caused by the collision of two black holes.

The LIGO experience testifies, among other things, to the strength of the teams facing 21^st the toughest challenges of the century. Indeed, one of the most universal changes in the innovation sector in recent years has been the growth of large teams in all areas of research and development, while solitary inventors, researchers and small firms teams have all experienced a decline.

This fundamental change is crucial for science and innovation policy, because it refers to large teams as the optimal drivers for the greatest breakthroughs of the future.

But do large and small teams differ by type of innovation? This is what we wanted to test with our postdoctoral researcher Lingfei Wu. We reviewed millions of articles, patents and software projects, summing up our ideas in an article published in Nature. In short, we have found that even as large teams progress and develop science, small teams are essential to bother this – a conclusion with broad implications for science and innovation.

The domination of the big teams

Decades of research on teams and collaborations have documented the growing dominance of larger teams on individuals and small teams in the fields of research, development and creation ranging from scientific studies to musicals of Broadway.

Indeed, discoveries and high-impact inventions are emerging today rarely from an isolated scientist, but rather from intricate networks of innovators working together in larger, more diverse teams and more and more. more complex. This trend reflects an important finding that has become a simple prescription: when it comes to teaming up, the bigger it gets, the better it is.

One of the reasons why we need big teams is that some achievements are just not possible for smaller groups. For example, the LIGO experience, a Nobel laureate, was implementing two laser beams between two 4 km tunnels housed in extreme vacuum, in order to detect a variation of about one thousandth of the diameter of the D & L. A proton. It had by far the highest price of any project ever funded by the National Science Foundation. It is therefore not surprising that more than 1,000 researchers were mentioned in the report.

Yet, there is reason to believe that large teams are not optimized for discovery or invention. For example, larger teams are more likely to have coordination and communication problems: inviting everyone to adopt an unconventional hypothesis or method, or changing direction to follow a new track will be difficult. Large teams may also be risk-averse because they require a steady flow of success to "pay the bills". As such, large teams – like large companies – tend to focus on safe bets with more established markets. On the other hand, small teams – like small businesses – with more to gain and less to lose, are more likely to undertake new untested opportunities.

This leads us to wonder if the story of relying only on large teams is incomplete. Our research suggests that the size of the team basically dictates the nature of the work a team is capable of producing and that the small size of the team provides some of the essential benefits that big teams do not like.

Large teams develop, small teams disrupt

To examine the effects of team size, we analyzed more than 65 million articles, patents and software published between 1954 and 2014.

We compared the work of large teams to that of small groups, a "small" team being defined as a team of three members or less. We measured the disruption of a job using an established measure of disruption that assessed how a given job destabilizes its field. This has shown us how research has eclipsed or made us rethink the old "state of the art", setting a new, valuable direction for others to follow.

Our analyzes revealed an almost universal pattern: while large teams tended to develop and develop existing ideas and designs, their smaller counterparts tended to disrupt current ways of thinking with new ideas, inventions and opportunities.

In other words, big teams excel in problem solving, but it's small teams that are more likely to create new problems that their larger counterparts need to solve. The work of large teams tends to rely on more recent popular ideas, while smaller teams go further in the past, inspiring more obscure ideas and earlier opportunities. Large teams, like major film studios, are more likely to generate sequels than new stories. We found that when the team size increased from 1 to 50 members, the associated disturbance level decreased rapidly.

Our results are remarkably robust against many tests and alternative explanations. For example, it could be argued that some types of people are more likely to work for smaller or larger teams, which changes the results associated with each. But when we compared the work of the even individual on a small team versus a large team, we found systematic differences consistent with our results. We also found that the differences between the teams are not due to the different types of subjects that large and small teams tend to study. This suggests that it is the size of the team rather than the effective sorting of people and problems.

Support small teams

Our work has some key practical implications. In general, large teams remain important on many levels, especially for large-scale work related to patents, software development and other areas. However, simply supporting large teams could hinder the growth of innovative ideas by preventing the flourishing ecology of science and technology.

Indeed, while LIGO was a feat that no small team could have achieved, unleashing a new spectrum of astronomical observation, the initial breakthrough was a cautious demonstration of earlier assumptions. The consortium attributed any measured deviation from the theory to instrument faults, thus making it logically impossible to violate expectations. LIGO was built to validate the very disturbing theory of general relativity, proposed exactly 100 years ago. In November 1915, when the Prussian Academy of Sciences heard for the first time "the discovery of 20^th century "was made by one author: Albert Einstein, the small team par excellence. The idea of ​​gravitational waves and their measurement have both advanced science, but in a very different way.

Moreover, given the perceived benefits of large teams, it is clear that funding agencies may prefer large teams to smaller ones, even if both are qualified. This can contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy that funnels disproportionately support large teams. If we do not really want to support and nurture small teams that disrupt conventional thinking by generating new directions, it is possible that innovation, the engine of economic growth, will slow down. Without small teams, we may never be able to discover the new problems to solve for the big teams, nor the new products to develop for the big teams.

It means that both Team types are vital to the long-term vitality of innovation: while small teams can lead to break-up and innovation, larger teams can rise to the challenge and take advantage of the challenge. To engage in the development of a given field, as part of a virtuous cycle.

These ideas also apply to businesses. In recent times, it was easy to believe that adding one or three other members to a team would always be the right choice – or at least it did not hurt. Our research shows that this is not true. The creation of larger teams probably shifts the attention and results of disruptive activities to development. For the most innovative projects looking to disrupt an area and move the needle dramatically, it may be worth thinking about how to reduce the size of the team.

Jeff Bezos said, "If you can not feed a team with two pizzas, it's too big." We need larger and more interdisciplinary sales teams to solve global problems more and more. complex, but small businesses and the teams they host are essential for agile research of new opportunities and the identification of next year's transformative innovations, so it is essential to ensure that different types of teams can work together to improve overall performance across companies and sectors.

The essential is: bigger is not always better. Determining the right team size for the position could be the first question that tomorrow's leaders will have to answer in order to unleash the potential of their businesses.