With access to a variety of knowledge that belongs to diverse ethnic backgrounds, multi-ethnic R&D teams have the potential to recombine knowledge to achieve novel breakthrough innovations. However, ethnic minority individuals in competitive organizational contexts may experience intra-subgroup conflicts, such as knowledge redundancy, rivalry, and reluctance to collaborate with their co-ethnic team members. We argue that ethnic minority team members are more conducive to generating breakthrough innovations if they are "ethnic singulars," defined as the sole team members with a specific ethnic minority background, than when they are "ethnic non-singulars." Furthermore, we anticipate these effects will be reinforced by team members' geographic collocation and prior collaboration experiences. Our empirical analysis of multi-ethnic R&D teams at 224 US ICT firms supports these claims.
