Revealing the intricate effect of collaboration on innovation

TL;DR

This study analyzes decades of patent data from Japan and the U.S. to understand how collaboration affects innovation, revealing that moderate repeat collaboration can boost performance but excessive collaboration does not.

Contribution

It systematically quantifies the nuanced impact of repeat collaboration on innovation performance across inventor and company teams in Japan and the U.S.

Findings

Inventor teams slightly outperform solo inventors.

Company teams perform as well as solo companies.

Moderate repeat collaboration improves performance, but excessive collaboration does not.

Abstract

We study the Japan and U.S. patent records of several decades to demonstrate the effect of collaboration on innovation. We find 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 find 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 at all. To systematically study the effect of repeat collaboration, we define the repeat collaboration number of a team as the average number of collaborations over all the teammate pairs. We find that mild repeat collaboration improves the performance of Japanese inventor teams and U.S. company teams. Yet, excessive repeat collaboration does not significantly help innovation at both the inventor and company levels in both countries. To control for unobserved heterogeneity, we perform a detailed regression analysis and the results are consistent with our simple observations. The presented results reveal the intricate effect of collaboration on innovation, which may also be observed in other creative projects.