The Growing Dominance of Teams

There should be no doubt that teams are the dominant form of organizing knowledge work in the 21st century. We all know that the era of the "lone inventor," which may actually never have existed, is certainly no longer in fashion. Now comes a 2007 review of millions of bibliographic records in the Institute for Scientific Information's [ISI] data base which provides strong evidence for both a growing preference for knowlege-professionals to work in teams, and for those teams to outperform individual performers in terms of influence.

Published in the highly-respected journal "Science," the study entitled "The Increasing Dominance of Teams in Production of Knowledge," by Wuchty, Jones & Uzzi ["Science," May 18, 2007], the study reviewed five decades of patent data and publications and concluded that "...preeminent work ... never appeared to be the domain of solo authors [or patenters]..., [and] the mantle of extraordinarily cited work has passed to teams by 2000."