  The shift from individual effort to collaborative output has benefited
science, with scientific work pursued collaboratively having increasingly led
to more highly impactful research than that pursued individually. However,
understanding of how the diversity of a collaborative team influences the
production of knowledge and innovation is sorely lacking. Here, we study this
question by breaking down the process of scientific collaboration of 32.9
million papers over the last five decades. We find that the probability of
producing a top-cited publication increases as a function of the diversity of a
team of collaborators---namely, the distinct number of institutions represented
by the team. We discover striking phenomena where a smaller, yet more diverse
team is more likely to generate highly innovative work than a relatively larger
team within one institution. We demonstrate that the synergy of collaboration
diversity is universal across different generations, research fields, and tiers
of institutions and individual authors. Our findings suggest that collaboration
diversity strongly and positively correlates with the production of scientific
innovation, giving rise to the potential revolution of the policies used by
funding agencies and authorities to fund research projects, and broadly the
principles used to organize teams, organizations, and societies.
