A study on creativity and team structure involving more than 600 people who entered a hall that contained 3 LEGO building platforms and whose interpersonal interactions were tracked with RFID tags finds that the growth rate of the LEGO constructions was high when teams were large and committed to a single platform; the presence of influential individuals also enhanced the growth rate, and the findings suggest that ideal team compositions that include weak ties as a source of ideas and viewpoints might help maximize team creativity and productivity.
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Article #19-09827: "Efficient team structures in an open-ended cooperative creativity experiment," by Bernardo Monechi, Giulia Pullano, and Vittorio Loreto.
MEDIA CONTACT: Bernardo Monechi, Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Paris, FRANCE; e-mail: bernardo.monechi@sony.com
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences