It’s hard to find examples where large-scale collaboration has worked more successfully than either individuals or small teams. However, it’s also hard to find examples of even small teams that were able to maintain their creative success over an individual.

Having worked with many such teams, it seems that there is a “Familiarity Factor” that can make or break success. While I don’t have an exact definition for the Familiarity Factor, I think that it has to do with the relative connection that each person has to the other in terms of daily interactions, previous social connections, and personality. Since these connections constantly change (even by the act of collaborating), maintaining a team’s creativity is nearly impossible, because it requires making frequent changes to the team, sometimes difficult changes, to keep the connection-level of the Familiarity Factor the same.

Think about the last time you were a member of a new team. Assuming that your team had a realistic goal and a realistic timeline, you probably came together and accomplished your goals with some amount of success. You didn’t know all of the other team members very well, you probably even found yourself not liking some of the team members, but you pushed through the exercise to accomplish the goal. Now think about when they “got the same team back together” for another project. The familiarity has increased, you’re more comfortable, the other members are more comfortably, and your less likely to “bend” for the good of the team. The creativity and accomplishments decrease. Even for the best performing teams, over time, this happens.

As another example, consider musical groups. It’s hard to think of many groups that stay together for very long. In most cases, they come together for a few collaborations, and then inevitably split apart. My guess is that the familiarity increases past a point where creativity can occur, in part due to the original closeness, new social connections that are made, and of course, personality.

Brian Uzzi, a sociologist at Northwestern, analyzed the collaborations behind thousands of Broadway productions. He discovered that plays produced by people who knew each other well in addition to plays produced by teams who didn’t know each other at all were more likely to fail (as defined by the box office and critics). What Uzzi discovered was there was only a small window between the two extremes that produced successful plays.

According to article published by the British Psychological Society, people who have been moderately impaired with alcohol fair much better on creativity exercises than their non-impaired counterparts, by a sizable margin: (they solved 58 per cent of 15 items on average vs. 42 per cent average success achieved by controls, and they tended to solve the items more quickly 11.54 seconds per item vs. 15.24 seconds).

The impaired participant’s blood alcohol level was 0.07, (barely below the legal limit in most U.S. states).  The researchers were careful to note that participants performed more poorly at on memory tests, and that higher levels of impairment did not produce the same creativity–so more was not better.

The general finding is that people who are not functioning at their peak mental capacity, have more creative insights, most likely from not thinking along conventional lines.  This hypothesis was evidenced in this post, The Best Time for you to Solve Problems, where more creativity was found in people who worked during their non-peak part of the day (for morning people, the night was more creative, and vice versa).

So, while I’m not advocating a Happy Hour to inspire creativity, shaking people out of their comfort zone certainly seems to help.

Why does it seem that the most creative people are the craziest? History is ripe with accounts of the eccentricities of creative people. Henry Ford, Steve Jobs, Vince Van Gogh, Howard Hughes and others dazzled us with both brilliance and unusual traits. But are creativity people really crazy, or are they just victims of popularity, jealousy and tabloids?

In a 2011 study by Gino and Ariely, they concluded that:

• Participants with creative personalities who scored high on a test measuring divergent thinking tended to cheat more;
• Dispositional creativity is a better predictor of unethical behavior than intelligence;
• Participants who were primed to think creatively were more likely to behave dishonestly because of their creativity motivation and,
• they had a greater ability to justify their dishonest behavior.

In a 2008 study by Wazcheic, et.al., they found that creativity individuals tend to be better at lying. Their premise was that lying, although frowned upon, was very useful in accomplishing many social goals, such as collaboration and exploiting others. They found that the best liars where also the most creative, perhaps because of their ability to get what they wanted the quickest.

Finally, in a 2011 article by Mayer, Jennifer; Mussweiler, Thomas, the researchers tested whether creative people where more distrustful. Their basic conclusion, was that they were, and is probably a result of their tendencies to wonder why something had to be done a certain way.

Most likely you’ve seen or heard about the Rabbit Duck illusion. If you look at the picture you can see either a rabbit or a duck, depending on how you look at it. Most people see the duck first, but can flip to see the rabbit. The measure of creativity is whether you can easily “flip” between the two pictures.

In an article published by the British Journal of Psychology, the authors tested a person’s ability to first come up with uses for a random object, such as how many ways they could use a paperclip. For example, in addition to using it to hold papers together, you could also make it into a key holder, or combine several to make a dinosaur. Creativity people (as defined by how many different ways they could use a paperclip) were not only able to use the paperclip in more ways than their non-creativity counterparts, but they were also able to easily see both the rabbit and the duck.

The hypothesis is that when you switch between the duck and rabbit, you are experiencing a small creative insight, by viewing the same object in a different way. In the process of creativity, people are often called on to improve or change an existing product/service to make it better. Creativity people are able to look at an object and easily imagine different uses–in the same way that they could look at the picture and see different images. So, which do you see, and how easily can you see both the rabbit and the duck?

A New York Times article written several days ago addressed how spending time alone is out of fashion, and that collaborative innovation is hot. There are a myriad of ways to constantly stay connected to your social networks, whether through smartphone applications, the web, open office space/cubicles, collaborative zones, and other software tools.

Every group has jumped on the bandwagon from business to academia, and there has been a plethora of software tools to support the process. The results have been quite unspectacular. It’s hard to point to examples where collaboration has produced a notable creation (think iPhone), whereas there are many examples of collaborative innovation producing polished copies (think Linux).

The realization is that most creative thinking is the result of “alone time,” and its been proven repeatedly. I believe that this is a result of several forces, however, two major elements are intuition and intellectual property. Human intuition allows us to make seemingly intelligent choices without having all of the information/data at hand. Having recently read about how Steve Jobs made choices for the iPod, he clearly did not do it collaboratively, but with an innate sense of what was right. We can already image what a collaborative innovation process would have produced, the MP3 player that already existed. The other element is intellectual property. When you (as the inventor) are creating something, you have a strong drive to keep the information private until have maximized the value (to yourself). Imagine that you were working on an algorithm to figure out how to beat the television show, Jeopardy. Would you share how to do this before or after you won a record dollar amount? Ask Roger Craig if need the answer.

So before you start figuring out how to build collaborative innovation into your organization, you might want to consider the outcome.

There is some convincing research that demonstrates that opposites don’t attract. Is this a problem? From a relationship perspective, this might be alright, but from an innovation perspective it isn’t.

Scientists studied a couple of different groups, but the main one was college students. They compared student relationships in a large college (25,000 students) and several smaller colleges (about 500 students) and determined whether “friends” were more or less similar. The researchers employed a variety of personality tests and questions to come to conclusions. The research showed that the friends at the larger college were very similar in ideas, tastes, beliefs, etc., whereas the smaller college had significantly less similarity. The researchers believe that a large reason for this is that at the larger college, you’re more likely to find someone who matches you more perfectly than at a smaller school.

In another study, researchers examined the question of whether people actually “mix” at mixers. Their model was a networking party for approximately 100 people associated with a school’s business program. In similar results, the researchers found that people where more likely to associate with people who they already were familiar with or where there was a third-party connection (two strangers have a mutual friend). One interesting conclusion was that people who came to the mixer with few friends were more likely to meet new people.

From an innovation perspective, you need to be careful that you don’t create a grouping of similar people when trying to solve complex, creative problems, or else you’ll lose the dynamic range of experience and opinions. While no ones to go on a long car ride with people we don’t get along with, from an innovation perspective, it might make more sense.

Do you consider yourself a morning person or a night person? If you’re a morning person, you probably think that your most creative time of day to solve problems is in the morning–you’re wide away and ready to take on the world. Conversely, if you’re a night person, you might believe that the night time is your most creative time of day to solve problems. However, in both of these instances, you’d be wrong.

Recently published research suggests just the opposite: that morning people are most creative at the worst part of their day–evening, and night people are most creative in the morning. Even though your mind is foggy, your creative abilities are at their highest. The researchers hypothesize that, “Insight-based problem-solving requires a broad, unfocused approach. You’re more likely to achieve that Aha! revelatory moment when your inhibitory brain processes are at their weakest and your thoughts are meandering.”

They tested their theory by recruiting subjects and having having each group perform tasks at their “highest point” and their “lowest point” in the day. Surprisingly, people were able to solve intuition-based problems at a higher percentage at the low point of their day–when they were the groggiest. (Analytic tasks were performed equally well throughout the day). The bottom line for you morning people is to start staying up late, whereas you night people need to start getting up early!

In research published in the Psychological Bulletin from the American Psychological Association, the question of whether employee engagement leads to success was addressed. The authors examined over 200 previous studies looking specifically for this correlation. In their research, success was defined across a variety of areas, including marriage, friendship, income, work performance, and health. They defined happiness and/or employee engagement as “the frequent experience of positive emotions.”

Shawn Achor suggests several ways to boost or enhance employee engagement in the business environment, and he tested it by asking tax preparers (during one of the most stressful times of the year–tax season) to perform these activities. The bottom line is that it worked, not only in the short-term, but also months after these activities were stopped.

Jot down three things they were grateful for.
Write a positive message to someone in their social support network.
Meditate at their desk for two minutes.
Exercise for 10 minutes.
Take two minutes to describe in a journal the most meaningful experience of the past 24 hours.

The researchers also tested whether positive employee engagement was linked with creativity, and found many positive correlations. While they acknowledged that creativity at times requires deliberate negativity or a single-minded focus, there were still benefits to working to make sure that your organization is at least supporting “positive emotions.”

We’re all familiar with the television commercials of the unlikely and innovative combinations of chocolate and peanut butter to create the Reese’s cup. I’ve found that for many organizations, the best ideas have been an innovative combination of two or more different elements into something different.

Michael Michalko wrote an interesting article describing this exact phenomenon:
The lawn mower, for example, was invented in the cloth making industry by Edwin Budding who worked on a machine that trimmed cloth smooth using revolving blades and rollers. He combined this concept with the scythe, which was commonly used to trim grass, attached a handle so it could be pushed and the first lawn mower was born.

So, why is this the case? In my opinion it’s because we tend to work in silos. Silos are created by experiences (engineers vs. accountants), ages (my generation vs. yours), geographies (Florida vs. Maine), politics, bosses, departments, customers, market segments, competitors, and so on. They’re unavoidable. The key to creating innovative combinations is to cross those boundaries with your ideas and make them better. By talking with different people, not only from within your own department/location, but also from other organizations, you create more powerful combinations. Next time your looking for good ideas, call a meeting with your engineers and marketers–it will surely be interesting.

I found an interesting research paper about the effect practicing (learning) has on expertise. The paper analyzed the differences between good and excellent violin players, considering all types of variables such as practice time, teachers, frequency, and success. While you might expect that more practice would yield greater results, it was only partially true. They found that top performers practiced no more than 4 hours per day, in no more than 80-120 minute sessions, with a break between sessions. Those who practiced more, did not get “better”, but rather burned out–so knowing your limits is important. When looking at all areas (not just violin players), they also found that athletes work most intensely in the mid-afternoon, and that scientists and novelists almost uniformly prefer the morning. I think this research also confirms, to some extent, the need to balance work and play, as they demonstrated that practicing more actually yielded less. However, the “play” time for most of the top people was spent within the domain of expertise. So, while the violin players weren’t practicing more than 4 hours per day, they were spending their other time in other related activities such as competitions, or group playing.