 Team diversity as dissimilarity and variety in organizational innovationDong Huo, Kazuyuki Motohashi and Han Gong Research Policy, 2019, vol. 48, issue 6, 1564-1572 Abstract: How team composition exactly influences innovation outcomes remains a complex and unsolved puzzle in the literature on creativity and innovation. Our study differentiates two types of team technology-related diversity—technological dissimilarity and technological variety, and investigates their influences on the impact of an invention created by a team. Analyses of over half million U.S. utility patents in the 1991–2005 period invented by teams reveal that technological variety of team inventors has a positive effect on invention impact, and that technological dissimilarity between team inventors plays both positive and negative roles, eliciting an inverted U-shaped effect. In addition, we find that the positive effect of dissimilarity is significantly reduced after controlling for variety. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed. Keywords: Team innovation; Team composition; Diversity; Dissimilarity; Variety; Knowledge availability; Knowledge utilization (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:respol:v:48:y:2019:i:6:p:1564-1572 DOI: 10.1016/j.respol.2019.03.020 Access Statistics for this article Research Policy is currently edited by M. Bell, B. Martin, W.E. Steinmueller, A. Arora, M. Callon, M. Kenney, S. Kuhlmann, Keun Lee and F. Murray More articles in Research Policy from Elsevier |
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