Structural Diversity Drives Disruptive Scientific Innovation
Scientific innovation increasingly depends on collaboration, yet the organizational structure that fosters breakthrough ideas remains poorly understood. Existing metrics - such as team size or compositional diversity - capture readily observable characteristics but not the deeper architecture of collaboration. We introduce Structural Diversity (SD): the extent to which a team bridges multiple distinct knowledge communities within its prior collaboration network. Using a century-scale dataset of 260 million scientific publications (1900-2025) and combining causal inference with a quasi-natural experiment based on a U.S. National Science Foundation policy change in 2012, we show that SD is ...
| Authors | Yichun Peng, Saike He, Peijie Zhang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.SI |
| Published | 2 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 April 2026 |
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