“Teams are a primary source of innovation in science and technology. Rather than examining the lone genius, scholarly and policy attention has shifted to understanding how team interactions produce new and useful ideas. Yet the organizational roots of innovation remain unclear, in part because of the limitations of current data. This paper introduces the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition, a model system for studying team science and innovation. … We reveal shared dynamical and organizational patterns across teams and identify features associated with team performance and success.”

Find the paper and full list of authors at ArXiv.