  Theories of innovation emphasize the role of social networks and teams as
facilitators of breakthrough discoveries. Around the world, scientists and
inventors today are more plentiful and interconnected than ever before. But
while there are more people making discoveries, and more ideas that can be
reconfigured in novel ways, research suggests that new ideas are getting harder
to find-contradicting recombinant growth theory. In this paper, we shed new
light on this apparent puzzle. Analyzing 20 million research articles and 4
million patent applications across the globe over the past half-century, we
begin by documenting the rise of remote collaboration across cities,
underlining the growing interconnectedness of scientists and inventors
globally. We further show that across all fields, periods, and team sizes,
researchers in these remote teams are consistently less likely to make
breakthrough discoveries relative to their onsite counterparts. Creating a
dataset that allows us to explore the division of labor in knowledge production
within teams and across space, we find that among distributed team members,
collaboration centers on late-stage, technical tasks involving more codified
knowledge. Yet they are less likely to join forces in conceptual tasks-such as
conceiving new ideas and designing research-when knowledge is tacit. We
conclude that despite striking improvements in digital technology in recent
years, remote teams are less likely to integrate the knowledge of their members
to produce new, disruptive ideas.
