A piece of research described in a Harvard Business Review article reveals that the main factor is the structure of the invention, namely the possibility of breaking it down into separate components. If the invention can be split into modules, a team effort will most likely lead to better results than a solo inventor.
Utility and design patents
An analysis was made of over one and a half million utility patents (functional innovations – innovations for products, processes, or machines) and almost 200,000 design patents (innovation in the area of form – distinct visual configuration of a product) which had been filed in the US in recent decades.
Breakthrough inventions were defined as those with top numbers of citations in their product class, since the success of an invention is often measured by the number of times it is cited in subsequent patents.
In design patents, individual inventors do not lag behind
A utility patent is more likely to be a breakthrough when there is a team of inventors. On the other hand, this team advantage disappears completely in the case of breakthrough design patents, where solo inventors are just as likely to invent them. Why is this so?
Iconic designs, such as the Coca-Cola curvy bottle or the iPhone, are fundamentally holistic. We perceive them in their entirety, not in terms of individual components (e.g. the part of the bottle we open). All elements are highly interdependent and we can’t really describe the contribution of each of the parts to the design as a whole.
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