Replacing the Renaissance Man: Are Teams More than the Sum of Their Parts?

As science becomes more complex, the idea of assembling diverse teams of specialists--much like a blacksmith, a mason, and a carpenter coming together to form a Leonardo da Vinci--has gained traction as a key solution to achieve groundbreaking innovations. This high expectation of "team science" has fueled the rise of teams as the fundamental unit of the social organization across all fields. However, recent research suggests that simply adding more experts to a team does not necessarily lead to more breakthrough ideas. In fact, despite the growth of research teams, truly radical innovations appear to be declining. Against this background, we investigate how scientists can effectively exchange, fuse, and create breakthrough ideas across disciplines within the team. Our study also compares the innovative performance between teams composed of generalists versus specialists, in the context of interdisciplinary collaboration (IDC). Using Microsoft Academic Graph, we examine 8 million papers between 1960 and 2020 published by 6 million scholars. We find that (1) Interdisciplinary teams are less disruptive than disciplinary teams and (2) In interdisciplinary collaboration, teams of generalists outperform teams of specialists in preserving their innovation capability as the team grows. While specialists and specialist teams are prevalent in science, our findings suggest that scholars who extend themselves to other disciplines and collaborate with others who do the same are better equipped to overcome the common challenges of IDC and produce highly disruptive scientific work. These results challenge the current zeitgeist that views specialization and team collaboration that build upon it as an inevitable and rewarding trend, and offer valuable insights into how to effectively evaluate and support team-based science.