May 26, 2005

Teams thrive on mix of old, new

By Megan Fellman

When the Boston Red Sox won their first World Series title since 1918 last year, the team had some new blood, including key players Curt Schilling, Orlando Cabrera and Doug Mientkiewicz, to mix with the old and help the team achieve the pinnacle of baseball success.

In a paper published April 29 in the journal Science, researchers turned to a different type of team — creative teams in the arts and sciences — to determine a team’s recipe for success. They discovered that the composition of a great team is the same whether you are on Broadway or in economics.

The researchers studied data on Broadway musicals since 1877 as well as thousands of journal publications in four fields of science and found that successful teams had a diverse membership — not of race and gender but of old blood and new. New team members clearly added creative spark and critical links to the experience of the entire industry. Unsuccessful teams were isolated from each other whereas the members of successful teams were interconnected, much like the Kevin Bacon game, across a giant cluster of artists or scientists.

“Do people go out of their way to collaborate with new people?” said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and the corresponding author on the paper. “Do they take this risk?

“We found that teams that achieved success — by producing musicals on Broadway or publishing academic papers in good journals — were fundamentally assembled in the same way, by bringing in some experienced people who had not worked together before. The unsuccessful teams repeated the same collaborations over and over again.”

Amaral, a physicist with expertise in computer-based modeling, found a new collaborator only 500 yards away across campus: sociologist Brian Uzzi, associate professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. Uzzi is one of the paper’s authors, along with Roger Guimerà, a postdoctoral fellow in Amaral’s lab, and Jarrett Spiro, a former undergraduate research assistant of Uzzi’s.

“When Luís discussed his work at a NICO event I knew immediately that we had to work together,” said Uzzi, who had been studying creativity and the network of big and successful Broadway musicals. “We discovered that assembling a successful team depends on choosing the right balance of diversity and cohesion — achieving the bliss point intersection of the two.” Diversity represents new collaborations; cohesion comes from repeat collaborations.

Uzzi points to “West Side Story” as an example of a successful team. Lyricist Stephen Sondheim was a Broadway newcomer while composer Leonard Bernstein and choreographer Peter Gennaro had experience on Broadway but had never worked together before.