Fresh Teams are More Effective and More Innovative

We all know that just about anything in the world is produced by teams. This has never been more true than in scientific disciplines with team dependencies increasing over the years as research topics have become more complex and collaboration in teams is essential (ditch that sole scientific genius stereotype, please).

There has been a lot of work on team collaboration, but one interesting aspect is of freshness of teams. In this context fresh doesn’t mean well slept and recovered — though that would be important also. Here freshness refers to how long teams or the members have worked together and how many members are new or fresh. This has not been researched previously.

Enter Zeng et al. from Bar-Ilann University. They systematically measured the originality and multi-disciplinary impact of scientific teams and their published papers. They then systematically measured the team freshness by measuring how often and how long team members had previously collaborated together.

This may go against standard thinking whereby experienced scientists might be considered more beneficial. Likely there is a good balance. But these results show that freshness either in terms of experience and in teams is important for quality of output!

I imagine this could transfer to many teams in business also. Let’s hope that research will come along soon.

But for now, if you have a team you might want to consider its freshness if you want original and impactful ideas.

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