Flat teams drive scientific innovation

Xu, Fengli; Wu, Lingfei; Evans, James A.

doi:10.1073/pnas.2200927119

Cited by 63 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Team size also influences the creative performance of these teams. Smaller, flatter teams tend to produce disruptive innovations by activating low-level cognitive conflict between team members holding diverse expertise (Wu et al, 2019;Xu et al, 2022).…”

Section: Sustainable Innovation Results From the Renewal Of These Pos...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Destructive creation, creative destruction, and the paradox of innovation science

Cao¹,

Chen²,

Evans³

2022

Preprint

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Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them unnavigable. This complexity results from innovation’s importance for society, but also the fundamental paradox underlying innovation science: When innovation becomes predictable, it ceases to be an engine of novelty and change. Here we review innovation studies and show that innovations emerge from contexts of discord and disorder, breaches in the structure of prior success, through a process we term destructive creation. This often leads to a complementary process of creative destruction whereby local structures protect and channel the diffusion of successful innovations, rendering alternatives obsolete. We find that social scientists naturally focus far more on how social and cultural contexts influence material innovations than the converse. We highlight computational tools that open new possibilities for the analysis of novel content and context in interaction, and show how this brings us empirically toward the broader range of possibilities that complex systems and science studies have theorized—and science fiction has imagined—the social, cultural and material structures of innovation conditioning each other’s change through cycles of disruption and development.

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Section: Sustainable Innovation Results From the Renewal Of These Pos...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Destructive creation, creative destruction, and the paradox of innovation science

Cao¹,

Chen²,

Evans³

2022

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Team size also influences the creative performance of these teams. Smaller, flatter teams tend to produce disruptive innovations by activating low‐level cognitive conflict between team members holding diverse expertise (Wu et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2022).…”

Section: Innovation Genesis As Destructive Creationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Destructive creation, creative destruction, and the paradox of innovation science

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them unnavigable. This complexity results from innovation's importance for society, but also the fundamental paradox underlying innovation science: When innovation becomes predictable, it ceases to be an engine of novelty and change. Here we review innovation studies and show that innovations emerge from contexts of discord and disorder, breaches in the structure of prior success, through a process we term destructive creation. This often leads to a complementary process of creative destruction whereby local structures protect and channel the diffusion of successful innovations, rendering alternatives obsolete. We find that social scientists naturally focus far more on how social and cultural contexts influence material innovations than the converse. We highlight computational tools that open new possibilities for the analysis of novel content and context in interaction, and show how this brings us empirically toward the broader range of possibilities that complex systems and science studies have theorized—and science fiction has imagined—the social, cultural and material structures of innovation conditioning each other's change through cycles of disruption and development.

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“…These groups run like traditional teams without a manager present. In a flat structure, the decision-making apparatus is distributed among the employees, which can speed up decision making, as information within the organization does not have to travel up a hierarchy, facing the potential for a veto at each step, before coming back down [ 12 , 17 , 26 ].…”

Section: Generative Entrenchment Of Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational Development as Generative Entrenchment

Moser

Smaldino

2022

Entropy

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A critical task for organizations is how to best structure themselves to efficiently allocate information and resources to individuals tasked with solving sub-components of the organization’s central problems. Despite this criticality, the processes by which organizational structures form remain largely opaque within organizational theory, with most approaches focused on how structure is influenced by individual managerial heuristics, normative cultural perceptions, and trial-and-error. Here, we propose that a broad understanding of organizational formation can be aided by appealing to generative entrenchment, a theory from developmental biology that helps explain why phylogenetically diverse animals appear similar as embryos. Drawing inferences from generative entrenchment and applying it to organizational differentiation, we argue that the reason many organizations appear structurally similar is due to core informational restraints on individual actors beginning at the top and descending to the bottom of these informational hierarchies, which reinforces these structures via feedback between separate levels. We further argue that such processes can lead to the emergence of a variety of group-level traits, an important but undertheorized class of phenomena in cultural evolution.

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Flat teams drive scientific innovation

Cited by 63 publications

References 16 publications

Destructive creation, creative destruction, and the paradox of innovation science

Destructive creation, creative destruction, and the paradox of innovation science

Destructive creation, creative destruction, and the paradox of innovation science

Organizational Development as Generative Entrenchment

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