This study focuses on effects of knowledge and experience on both mean and variance measures of individual and team innovations. We propose that multiple knowledge domains produce novel combinations that increase the variance of product performance and that extensive experience produces outputs with high average performance. We analyzed innovations in the comic book industry, finding that innovations with extreme success and failure were affected by factors similar to those affecting high-performing innovations. Multimember teams and teams with experience working together produced innovations with greater variation in value, but individuals were able to combine knowledge diversity more effectively than teams.If you're not especially versed in academic-speak, what they're basically saying is that, all other things being equal, comic books whose creators have a greater variety of genre experience are more likely to be good than comics whose creators who have worked in a smaller set of genres. Furthermore, that this is more pronounced in individual creators than it is with teams. To put it another way, the amount of experience a creator has will have less of an impact on a comic's success than the breadth of that experience.
In my research about comics, one thing that sometimes comes up when you're reading how-to guides and such is to absorb as much as you can throught others' experiences. If you want to write comics, read a bunch of comics to see which metaphors and analogies work and which don't. If you want to draw comics, look at a bunch of other comics to see how different illustration and storytelling techniques impact the reader's journey. Less often said, though, is to look at MORE than just comics; and this is frequently emphasized even more to the fans of superhero comics. If all you ever read is Batman, all you're going to be able to do is regurgitate old Batman stories. But if you also read about Sherlock Holmes and and Flash Gordon and Alice in Wonderland and Jason Bourne and James Bond and Zatoichi and Asterix and Anna Karenina and In my research about comics, one thing that sometimes comes up when you're reading how-to guides and such is to absorb as much as you can throught others' experiences. If you want to write comics, read a bunch of comics to see which metaphors and analogies work and which don't. If you want to draw comics, look at a bunch of other comics to see how different illustration and storytelling techniques impact the reader's journey. Less often said, though, is to look at MORE than just comics; and this is frequently emphasized even more to the fans of superhero comics. If all you ever read is Batman, all you're going to be able to do is regurgitate old Batman stories. But if you also read about Sherlock Holmes and Juliet Capulet and Flash Gordon and Alice in Wonderland and Jason Bourne and James Bond and Zatoichi and Asterix and Anna Karenina and all manner of other characters, you can bring a rounder, fuller approach to your interpretation of Batman. Likewise, if all you ever read are superhero comics, your own comics are going to be largely repetitive of them.
What Taylor and Greve's paper shows is that, quantifiably based on comic sales data, that bringing in a broader range of experiences is a creator's best path for success. If they've done comics about superheroes and science fiction and crime noir and Westerns and romance and non-fiction and whatever else, their subsequent comics will benefit more than if they had focused exclusively on one or two genres. I think that's something many older professionals have inherently known anecdotally -- that's part of why they always look towards folks like Jack Kirby and Will Eisner; they weren't just prolific, they were prolific across multiple genres --- but this paper is academic research showing that is indeed the case!
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