  Human collective tasks in teams and organizations increasingly require
participation of members with diverse backgrounds working in networked social
environments. However, little is known about how network structure and the
functional diversity of member backgrounds would interact with each other and
affect collective processes. Here we conducted three sets of human-subject
experiments which involved 617 university students who collaborated anonymously
in a collective ideation task on a custom-made online social network platform.
We found that spatially clustered collectives with assortative background
distribution tended to explore more diverse ideas than in other conditions,
whereas collectives with random background distribution consistently generated
ideas with the highest utility. We also found that higher network connectivity
may improve individuals' overall experience but may not improve the collective
performance regarding idea generation, idea diversity, and final idea quality.
