Please register for the CV & Online Identity Workshop below.

Teams making breakthrough inventions and teams venturing into deep space share something in common. The hidden patterns in how team networks configure play an important role in their success. This talk shares the latest findings from my two programmatic research streams seeking to discover the optimal patterns of “networked teams.” The first stream shares findings of research conducted in partnership with NASA exploring the leadership and cognitive networks that enable small teams living and working together effectively while on a simulated space mission. This work develops an agent-based model predicting crew cognitive networks calibrated with data from 8, 4-member teams living in isolation in a space analog for 45 days. The findings reveal what types of leadership networks are integral to development and maintenance of crew shared mental models over time. Shared leadership has the largest effect, followed by hierarchical and coordinated leadership networks. Fragmented leadership networks are especially precarious for crews advancing the frontiers of science into deep space. The second stream presents findings using data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office exploring expertise diversity in inventor teams. In this work, I propose a text-based measure of substantive expertise based on the researchers’ prior inventions and networks. Calculating this measure on 2.8 million teams whose inventions were granted patents, I find the novel measure is a reliable predictor of team innovation atypicality (i.e., atypical knowledge combination) and success (i.e., citation rates). Like space teams, the networks of expertise among inventor teams enables their inventions to push the frontiers of science.