The lone scientist who makes breakthrough discoveries is more myth than reality. Thomas Alva Edison, for instance, did not invent the electric light bulb, phonograph and motion pictures all on his own. In truth, those products were the results of years of hard work by teams of researchers. At one point, Edison”s labs employed hundreds of people in a veritable invention factory. Indeed, innovation is typically a group effort, not an individual undertaking. But how exactly do researchers collaborate with one another to innovate?

To answer that, we compiled a dataset identifying all coauthorship relationships of U.S. patent inventors from 1975 through 1999. More than two million unique individual inventors and their patent coauthors were identified for that time period, and the data revealed trends that spilled across time and across company and geographic boundaries. To investigate those trends, we interviewed a representative sample of inventors about their social and collaborative networks, career moves and job changes. (The complete study is contained in “Managing Creativity in Small... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.