Where Do Stars Come From? The Role of Star vs. Nonstar Collaborators in Creative Settings

Despite being rare, stars make disproportionately influential contributions to their fields. This paper studies the role of inter-personal collaboration in the emergence of star designers — in particular, how a designer’s likelihood of becoming a star is affected by collaborating with stars as compared to non-stars.The authors find that collaborating with a star makes a designer much more likely to attain star status than collaborating with non-stars. More importantly, the authors examine how the quality of a collaborator (star vs. non-star) moderates the influence of two important contextual factors of collaboration: social network cohesion and expertise similarity.Social network cohesion and expertise similarity have been associated with both positive and negative collaboration outcomes in prior literature. By distinguishing collaborators based on their quality, the authors reconcile those contrasting results.The authors test their predictions on a large longitudinal data set consisting of all designers who were granted a design patent in the United States from 1975 through 2010.