Team Size and Its Negative Impact on the Disruption Index

TL;DR

This paper investigates how increasing team size negatively affects innovation disruption, demonstrating that smaller teams tend to produce more transformative work over the long term, even after accounting for various factors.

Contribution

It provides additional evidence that larger teams are less disruptive, emphasizing the importance of small teams for long-term scientific innovation.

Findings

Negative relationship between team size and disruption index confirmed

Long-term disruptive potential of small teams is underestimated in short-term analyses

Small teams often require a decade or more to realize their transformative impact

Abstract

As science transitions from the age of lone geniuses to an era of collaborative teams, the question of whether large teams can sustain the creativity of individuals and continue driving innovation has become increasingly important. Our previous research first revealed a negative relationship between team size and the Disruption Index-a network-based metric of innovation-by analyzing 65 million projects across papers, patents, and software over half a century. This work has sparked lively debates within the scientific community about the robustness of the Disruption Index in capturing the impact of team size on innovation. Here, we present additional evidence that the negative link between team size and disruption holds, even when accounting for factors such as reference length, citation impact, and historical time. We further show how a narrow 5-year window for measuring disruption can misrepresent this relationship as positive, underestimating the long-term disruptive potential of small teams. Like "sleeping beauties," small teams need a decade or more to see their transformative contributions to science.