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Of the many “rules” attributed to Jeff Bezos, his two-pizza rule is perhaps the most famous: every internal team should be small enough to be fed with two pizzas — ostensibly to make teams more innovative and meetings more productive.

When it comes to scientific research, however, the world ignores Bezos’s wisdom. As large-scale scientific collaboration becomes increasingly popular, research groups grow bigger and bigger.

A world record seems to belong to a physics paper published in 2015. It has 5,154 authors. Only nine pages of the 33-page article describe the research itself; the rest lists the authors and their affiliation. Can you imagine how many pizzas you would need to provide lunch for such a tight-knit group of collaborators?

The proponents of “the bigger, the better” approach could point to at least one argument in support of their position: a positive correlation between a team’s size and a citation impact of a product that this team has produced. This correlation holds not only for STEM research, but also for social sciences, art and humanities, and patents. The bigger the team of collaborators, the greater the buzz their work is generating.

And yet, Bezos might be having the last laugh.

A group of scientists from the University of Chicago designed an advanced, more nuanced citation-based index capable of discriminating between “disruptive” and more conventional (“consolidating”) research contributions.

Their logic was this: when future citations to a given article also reference a substantial proportion of that article’s own references, then the article can be seen as consolidating its scientific domain. However, when future citations do not acknowledge the article’s own references, the article can be seen as disrupting its domain. (For example, the index shows that articles directly contributing to Nobel prizes tend to exhibit high levels of disruptiveness; at the other extreme, review articles tend to be highly “consolidating.”)

Researchers analyzed more than 65 million articles, patents, and software products generated over 1954–2014. They show that smaller teams tend to come up with more new ideas and opportunities (disruptive contribution), whereas larger teams tend to just develop existing (consolidating contribution).

They also show that work from larger teams often builds on more recent and popular developments, so that attention to their work comes immediately. By contrast, contributions by smaller teams go more deeply into the past and, if successful, project further into the future.

I suggest applying these results to the incremental vs. disruptive innovation dichotomy. When pursuing incremental (profit-consolidating, so to speak) innovation, firms would seem to benefit from creating larger teams that could rapidly expand on recent product development gains. On the other hand, achieving disruptive innovation goals would be more plausible by establishing many small groups pursuing diverse projects — essentially mimicking the approach used by VC investors.

By the way, if someone happens to bump into Bezos, ask him on my behalf, what type of pizza, in his opinion, benefits innovation more: Italian-style or Chicago deep-dish?