Impact of Team Size on Technological Contributions: Unpacking Disruption and Development

Abstract

While single individuals and small teams used to be the primary driving forces of scientific and technological breakthroughs, large teams have become more important in recent years. This raises an important question of how large and small teams may contribute to technological advances differently. According to the combinatorial view of technology, a new technology can simultaneously develop and disrupt different parts of its knowledge base. Hence, we in this study developed a novel dual-index approach that uses disruption and development indexes to quantitatively measure the extent to which a technology disrupts and develops its knowledge base. Using these two indexes, we analyzed a dataset of 5.5 million US patents and found that large teams are more likely to both develop and disrupt previous technologies than small teams. Importantly, our finding is robust and unaffected by different samples and different index operationalization. Our study suggests that scientific contributions have two dimensions – devolvement and disruption – and large teams have advantages in advancing technology in both dimensions than small teams.