In professional networks that acted as fertile soil for successful groups, individuals moved easily among teams, crossing organizational and disciplinary boundaries and finding new collaborators. Networks that spawned unsuccessful teams, conversely, were broken into small, isolated clusters in which the same people collaborated over and over. Efficient and comfortable, perhaps, but apparently not a creative engine. “The entire network looks different when you compare a successful team with an unsuccessful team,” according to Luís A. Nunes Amaral, a Northwestern physicist who studies networks.
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