2024-01-30 16:16:51
“This prize does not belong to me, it comes down to the whole team said Kieran Culkin, Golden Globe winner for best actor for Succession This year. This phrase often comes up in Hollywood winners’ speeches, reminding us that the stars who dazzle us on screen would be nothing without the team around them. “I repeat, but this series is the fruit of the work of an entire team,” insisted Jesse Armstrong, the creator of Successionexpressing the same feeling.
Outside of Hollywood talk, however, we tend to focus on individual achievements. In business or science, the dominant cultural narrative is that the majority of innovations are the work of a handful of exceptional individuals or “headliners.” We praise pioneers like Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein and give those who appear to have the same potential the resources to continue doing high-value work.
Renowned scientists are those who publish more than average, write high-impact articles and actively participate in commercial projects. Yet science is rarely an individual activity. Renowned scientists, like others, are surrounded by a team, or “constellation”, of collaborators. Moreover, the team size increased by approximately 50% during the last two decades of the 20the century. Furthermore, in recent years, more than 80% of all scientific and engineering publications and more than two-thirds of patents are signed by several authors.
But how much impact does a single person have on the overall performance of a collaboration? In a recent article research, we studied the relative contribution of individuals and their collaborators to scientific innovation, in order to understand how to optimize the composition of teams to improve their performance.
The weight of renowned researchers
Leading researchers improve collective performance in two ways. First, their presence and contribution strengthen the quality and production of their collaborators, resulting in greater success for the entire team. Previous studies have looked at this so-called ripple effect by looking at what happens when a prominent researcher leaves the group. They show that in this case, the publication rate of his former colleagues lasting decline 5 to 10%.
Second, once a researcher becomes reputable, it is easier to attract talent and resources. This mechanism is called the “Matthew effect”, after a (fairly free) interpretation of a biblical passage. Concretely, “the Matthew effect” illustrates the cases where the renowned researcher rides on his own success more than the others.
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In fact, studies have shown that renowned researchers benefit from privileged access to valuable resources such as funding, talented graduates and cutting-edge laboratories, both in the academic and public sectors.
In the past, research has focused on the ripple effect or the Matthew effect, but separately, although these two notions are inextricably linked. We have therefore developed a model to understand this complexity.
We studied the relationships between headliners and their constellations in collaborations that resulted in inventions. University researchers must present their inventions to the institutions to which they are attached. These declarations are legal documents that prove useful for our study, because they ignore any preferential treatment or any institutional policy likely to distort the rate of attribution of publications to their authors. This data comes from an American university with a renowned medical school.
The analysis focused on data from 555 invention declarations registered between 1988 and 1999. Among the 1,003 scientists, including 248 research directors, we identified a cohort of 30 “headliners” appearing among the 5%. of the most cited researchers in the world.
Irreplaceable headliners
Renowned scientists make a major contribution to their teams, that is to say greater than that of other members, when they are “irreplaceable”. In other words, they are in such symbiosis with the rest of the team that the constellation would be incapable of producing work of such quality without them, including with the help of another research director.
So, what causes this “symbiosis” with the team? We looked for trends among these datasets, considering research impact, knowledge level, and seniority of group members, to determine what most influences scientists’ choice of collaborators.
We found that high-value research directors tend to work with high-value collaborators as well, supporting the idea that renowned scientists attract talented constellations. Furthermore, the most eminent research directors have access to, and are favored by, collaborators with whom they share certain skills, although too much similarity makes collaboration less favorable. A common language and goals are a strength, but overlapping skills hinder innovation.
Also, high-quality research managers tend to work in groups that include both young and older scientists. We can therefore affirm that the diversity of perspectives and skills is conducive to discoveries. Finally, the research profile of renowned scientists and their collaborators is generally similar in terms of the areas of application of their research.
The immensity of the sky
We used these results to find out who, the leader or the constellation, contributes the most to scientific discoveries. When a leader and a constellation are in symbiosis, they produce higher quality research. For each collaboration, we calculated which, the headliner or the constellation would be the most difficult to replace.
To do this, we replaced a headliner or constellation with the one that was second in compatibility. The more the impact of the research diminished, the more essential the presence of the missing headliner or constellation became.
Surprisingly, our results show that it is rare for a single person’s contribution to have more impact than that of the entire team. The relative contribution of the headliner to knowledge creation only exceeds that of the constellation in 14.3% of collaborations. More than three times out of four, no one dominates, and it is the complementarity between the headliner and the constellation that brings the most value to the research. In almost all collaborations, the collective enterprise aimed to innovate.
In summary, to identify the drivers of innovation and discovery, a few very bright stars should not prevent us from seeing the immensity of the sky.
The authors do not work for, consult, own or receive funding from any organization that would benefit from this article, and have declared no affiliations other than their research organization.
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