By Andrew Blackman
"USA250: The Story of the World's Greatest Economy" is a yearlong WSJ series examining America's first 250 years. Read more about it from Editor in Chief Emma Tucker.
Their names are legendary. Edison invented the lightbulb as we know it. Newton wrote the law of universal gravitation, inspired by a falling apple.
Elementary-school curricula are full of stories of lone inventors experiencing flashes of inspiration. Academic research, however, suggests that the way innovation really works is more complex -- and more collaborative.
"On average, teams outperform lone inventors," says Lee Fleming, a management professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley. "The romantic myth of the lone inventor doesn't really hold up."
Fleming and Insead professor of strategy Jasjit Singh analyzed millions of patent filings in a 2010 study to determine whether teams or individuals were responsible for the most successful inventions. They defined an invention's success by how often it was cited by future patents. The result was that lone inventors were less likely to achieve major breakthroughs and more likely to create particularly poor inventions.
Why teams win
Teams are effective, Fleming says, because innovation often relies on a process called "recombinant search" -- trying out different ways of combining existing ideas to create something new. Colleagues can contribute their own knowledge and ideas to the process, increasing the number of combinations. Team members also serve as a reality check, helping to weed out bad ideas.
On top of that, science has advanced so far since the days of Newton that it's hard for a single inventor to have enough breadth and depth of knowledge to work alone.
"Innovators are now trained to understand a small piece of the world around them," says Brian Uzzi, a professor of leadership at the Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. "To look at larger structures and make breakthroughs, you have to put all these separate points of view back together. And that's really what teams do."
After a certain point, however, teams become unwieldy, and it becomes harder to organize the team and manage communication. Larger teams outperform small ones up to about five members, Uzzi says, but after that, you tend to get diminishing returns.
Uzzi also says that teams that include people with varied experiences or from diverse fields of research tend to be more innovative, because they do a better job of bringing in different ideas. His analysis of 6.6 million academic papers found that mixed-gender teams produced work that was substantially more novel and had a higher impact than same-gender teams of an equivalent size.
The collective brain
Another form of teamwork is much broader and less organized. When Edison had his famous "lightbulb moment" in 1879, British scientist Joseph Swan was also on the cusp of inventing an incandescent lightbulb using similar techniques. Swan had been working on the problem for decades, much earlier than Edison, as had other scientists -- and they had already created functioning electric lamps, albeit not very effective or reliable ones. Edison's contribution was an innovation that made electric light much more practical and commercially viable, but it was also part of a larger process of collective scientific research.
Look more closely at many major innovations throughout history and you'll find a similar process of so-called simultaneous invention -- different researchers consuming the same material and reaching similar conclusions independently. Newton and Gottfried Leibniz came up with calculus at roughly the same time, Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filed patent applications for the telephone on the same day, and what we now call Darwinism could just as easily be named after Alfred Russel Wallace, who developed his own theory of evolution based on natural selection at around the same time.
Michael Muthukrishna, professor of economic psychology at the London School of Economics, describes innovation as a collaborative effort, with inventors functioning like neurons in the "collective brain" of a society. His research shows that innovation occurs more quickly in larger populations with efficient ways of transmitting knowledge and a high tolerance for diversity.
When alone is best
It isn't all bad news for those lone inventors toiling away in their garages, however. Research by Tian Heong Chan, associate professor of information systems and operations management at Emory University's Goizueta Business School, has uncovered specific cases in which individuals beat teams.
In analyzing large-scale patent data, Chan and his co-authors of a paper on the research made a distinction between "utility patents" (describing how a new invention works) and "design patents" (how that invention is constructed). For utility patents, they found similar results to Fleming and Uzzi: Lone inventors were about 17% less likely to achieve a breakthrough. For design patents, however, that gap disappeared, and individuals were no longer at a disadvantage.
The reason, Chan says, is that designs tend to be harder to break down into components and easier for a single person to work on.
"We figured that might be a clue as to why a certain kind of technology invention favors the lone inventor, because it's just hard to separate out and give it to different people to work on," Chan says.
The power of myth, and of AI
If innovation is such a collaborative process, then why has the myth of the lone innovator remained so persistent?
"In popular culture, the hero story is an easy sell, and people like to explain the world that way," says Sebastian Fixson, professor of innovation and design at Babson College. It's easier to think of Steve Jobs as a genius who invented the iPhone than it is to imagine countless teams of engineers collaborating with designers and managers for years, while also drawing on earlier inventions by other teams inside and outside Apple.
"I think American society is particularly in love with this idea of the hero story," Fixson says. "It's part of the way this country explains its own success."
The lone inventor myth also makes the act of invention feel more accessible. If inventions are sudden flashes of inspiration, then they can happen to anyone tinkering in a garage or sitting under an apple tree.
Recent years have given lone inventors a new tool that could at least partly level the playing field: artificial intelligence. In theory, AI should let individuals enjoy some of the benefits of teams, such as access to a range of scientific knowledge and the ability to combine different ideas in new ways.
Uzzi's latest research suggests, however, that using AI as a collaborator in innovation has its limits. He had both humans and AI large language models complete a standard test for measuring creativity: Think of 10 nouns that differ as widely as possible. The AI and human scores were quite similar, even though the bots had access to vast amounts of data.
Where AI proved more useful was in suggesting a better way of approaching the task: Instead of thinking of 10 individual words, think of 10 very different categories, and then fill in the words afterward.
"If you want to use a bot as a creative partner, you don't want to ask the bot for the answer," Uzzi says. "You want to ask the bot for a way to think about getting to the right answer."
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(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 05, 2026 14:00 ET (18:00 GMT)
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