Mixing genres, matching people: A study in innovation and team composition in Hollywood

Abstract

The study of innovation in cultural industries has addressed primarily the role played by organizational and environmental determinants. Research on teams has shown that innovation also depends on team composition and related team-level processes. In this study we develop two hypotheses arguing that the introduction of newcomers, and new combinations of both newcomers and old-timers in teams show positive relationships with innovation. We test our theory in the U.S. feature film industry and consider genre innovation as our measure of innovation. We use data on 6446 motion pictures produced by the Hollywood Majors in the period 1929-1958 for our empirical analysis.