Exploring team creativity: The nexus between freshness and experience

Scientific collaborations are widely acknowledged as a key factor in advancing contemporary science. Using the absence of prior collaboration relationships among all team members of a focal paper to assess team freshness, previous studies demonstrated strong associations between team freshness and the ability to generate original and multidisciplinary papers. However, the intricate interplay between team freshness and the experiences of new members remains less explored. For example, individuals can be classified based on their experiences or ages, distinguishing between newcomers with limited experience and incumbents with a track record of publications. Using the existing definition of team freshness, we focus on categorizing fresh teams into two distinct types: those consisting of fresh incumbents and those with fresh newcomers. Utilizing a comprehensive dataset comprising over 5 million articles, we systematically investigate the relationship between team freshness, the freshness of incumbents, and the freshness of newcomers on various creativity measurements. Our analysis yields several key findings. Firstly, both team freshness and the freshness of newcomers display a declining trend over time, whereas the freshness of incumbents remains stable. Secondly, we observe strong positive associations between team freshness, the freshness of incumbents, and the freshness of newcomers with regard to various creativity indicators. Strikingly, we emphasize substantial promotional powers of the freshness of incumbents on creativity, even after adjusting for overall team freshness. Our results have important policy implications related to the formation of creative teams.