Revisiting the Role of Collaboration in Creating Breakthrough Inventions

Team Collaboration in Innovation Contests

“…In this case, it is advisable for the organizer to obligate solvers to make team submissions, if possible. Finally, consistent with a recent empirical finding of Chan et al (2020), we show that the organizer benefits more from team submissions as the redundancy in team members' efforts decreases.…”

“…This result may help explain why InnoCentive provides solvers with team project rooms. This result is also consistent with the empirical finding of Chan et al (2020) who suggest that decomposability of an invention favors teams over individuals because we may expect that redundancy decreases with decomposability.…”

“…5 There are also empirical and experimental studies in the innovation and product-development literature on teams. For instance, Sosa et al (2004) study the alignment of design interfaces and team interactions, Singh and Fleming (2010) study the asymmetry of tails of a creative outcome distribution, Girotra et al (2010) compare the case where solvers work together and the case where solvers first work as individuals and then work together, Taneri and Meyer (2017) study the drivers of pharmaceutical alliances, Chan et al (2020) study the impact of invention decomposability on the effectiveness of teams and individuals in creating inventions, and Sommer et al (2020) compare two extreme cases where all solvers work together to develop a collective solution and where each solver develops an individual solution. For a detailed review of empirical and experimental studies on teams, we refer the reader to a recent study by Chan et al (2020).…”

How Do You Search for the Best Alternative? Experimental Evidence on Search Strategies to Solve Complex Problems

“…A change in the setting, together with new incentives (for individual performance) encouraged the individuals nevertheless to search again. related to H4a echoes a similar (in spirit) finding that Chan et al (2017) document in their analysis of success in filing design patents. The authors observe that successfully filed design patents by individual designers greatly benefit from these designers having collaborated in other design patents in the past.…”

“…One of the commonly cited search benefits of collaborative work in these activities is their ability to integrate a range of perspectives into the search process. Different perspectives allow a problem to be viewed through a variety of vantage points, and allow a variety of methods to be considered and combined in ways that would not be otherwise possible (Singh and Fleming 2010;Chan et al 2017). In that sense, collaborative structures enable search outcomes that could not have been possible through individual perspectives alone.…”