Wu and colleagues determined that working in groups of different sizes often has different outcomes. Their results confirm the value of design that supports teams of various sizes. The investigators found that when they analyzed “more than 65 million papers, patents and software products that span the period 1954-2014…smaller teams have tended to disrupt science and technology with new ideas and opportunities, whereas larger teams have tended to develop existing ones…These results demonstrate that both small and large teams are essential to a flourishing ecology of science and technology…These results support the hypothesis that large teams may be better designed or incentivized to develop current science and technology, and that small teams disrupt science and technology with new problems and opportunities.”
In an article reporting on the Wu, Wang and Evans study published in the New York Times (Benedict Carey, February 13, 2019, “Can Science Be Too Big?”), Evans was quoted: “’You might ask what is large, and what is small…Well, the answer is that this relationship holds no matter where you cut the number: between one person and two, between ten and twenty, between 25 and 26.’”
Lingfei Wu, Dashun Wang, and James Evans. 2019. “Large Teams Develop and Small Teams Disrupt Science and Technology.” Nature, Research Letter, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-0941-9
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.