This study examines the impact of team familiarity on the novelty of innovations and how this effect is moderated by the type of team—specifically, user teams compared to professional teams. Building on the literature on team mental models and creativity, we hypothesize that repeated collaboration negatively affects a team's ability to create novel solutions (Hypothesis 1). Furthermore, we posit that this negative effect is more pronounced in user teams than in professional teams (Hypothesis 2). To test our hypotheses, we utilize a comprehensive dataset from the board game industry, encompassing information on 7,053 games and their design teams from 1990 to 2018. We measure novelty based on the combination of game mechanics and analyze team familiarity through the frequency of prior collaborations among team members. The results indicate that team familiarity is indeed negatively correlated with the novelty of innovations and that this effect is stronger in user teams. These findings provide significant contributions to our understanding of how team dynamics influence creative performance and have implications for the composition and management of teams in innovation processes, especially in user-driven contexts.
