Brian Uzzi presents two studies on innovation in science. Study one examines conditions favoring the generation of innovative, high impact ideas and study two examines the conditions that effectively communicate innovative ideas to others. In study one, he examines the role of gender diverse teams in the creation of high impact and novel research relative to same gender teams. The study analyzes of over 26 million scientific papers. They find that mixed gender teams across in medical science produce more highly cited and more novel research papers than same gender teams, a relationship that increases with the team’s gender balance and regardless of whether the team’s leader is a woman or a man. Further, despite the impact of gender diverse teams, and their broad generalizability across science, gender diverse teams remain underrepresented in science – potentially slowing innovations. In study 2, they investigate how the merits of innovative ideas communicated in science. Here we conduct semantic analyses of grant application success with a focus on scientific promotional language, which purportedly helps to convey an innovative idea’s originality. Our analysis attempts to surmount limitations of prior studies by examining the full text of tens of thousands of both funded and unfunded grants from three leading public and private funding agencies, the NIH, NSF, and Novo Nordisk Foundation, one of the world’s largest private science foundations. We find a robust association between promotional language and the support and adoption of innovative ideas. They find that the percentage of promotional language in a grant proposal is associated with up to a doubling in its probability of being funded, with a grant’s inherent level of innovativeness, and with its predicted citation impact and productivity. Lastly, a computer-assisted experiment that manipulated the promotional language in our data helps to uncover how promotional language may communicate the merits of ideas through cognitive activation.

Learning Objectives: 

1. Review two-step process of innovation in science.

2. Demonstrate the link between gender diverse teams and the generation of innovative and high impact ideas.

3. Demonstrate the link between promotional language successful grant applications and high impact publications.