Despite the growing importance of teams in producing innovative and
high-impact science and technology, it remains unclear how expertise diversity
among team members relates to the originality and impact of the work they
produce. Here, we develop a new method to quantify the expertise distance of
researchers based on their prior career histories and apply it to 23 million
scientific publications and 4 million patents. We find that across science and
technology, expertise-diverse teams tend to produce work with greater
originality. Teams with more diverse expertise have no significant impact
advantage in the short- (2 years) or mid-term (5 years). Instead, they exhibit
substantially higher long-term impact (10 years), increasingly attracting
larger cross-disciplinary influence. This impact premium of expertise diversity
among team members becomes especially pronounced when other dimensions of team
diversity are missing, as teams within the same institution or country appear
to disproportionately reap the benefits of expertise diversity. While
gender-diverse teams have relatively higher impact on average, teams with
varied levels of gender diversity all seem to benefit from increased expertise
diversity. Given the growing knowledge demands on individual researchers,
implementation of incentives for original research, and the tradeoffs between
short-term and long-term impacts, these results may have implications for
funding, assembling, and retaining teams with originality and long-lasting
impacts.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figure