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

30 Pages Posted: 4 Jun 2019 Last revised: 28 Oct 2019

See all articles by Jiyao Chen

Jiyao Chen

Oregon State University

Diana Shao

Oregon State University - College of Business

Shaokun Fan

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Jiexun Li

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Date Written: May 15, 2019

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.

Keywords: Disruption Index, Development Index, Team Size

Suggested Citation

Chen, Jiyao and Shao, Diana and Fan, Shaokun and Li, Jiexun, Impact of Team Size on Technological Contributions: Unpacking Disruption and Development (May 15, 2019). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3388462 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3388462

Jiyao Chen (Contact Author)

Oregon State University ( email )

Corvallis, OR 97331
United States
5417376338 (Phone)

Diana Shao

Oregon State University - College of Business ( email )

Corvallis, OR 97331
United States

Shaokun Fan

affiliation not provided to SSRN

Jiexun Li

affiliation not provided to SSRN

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