Most new-project-development managers would die for a pair of innovators like John Lennon and Paul McCartney, a team that maintained its creativity year after revelatory year.

So why are executives consistently told by researchers that repeated collaboration smothers creativity? Who's right, the world-changing composers of "A Day in the Life" or a bunch of professors?

I'd be curious to hear what you think. It's a puzzling thing. Very soon after they started collaborating, John Lennon and Paul McCartney became a well-oiled innovation machine.

"Every time we went to sit down — and it was normally about a three-hour writing session — we never came out without a finished song," McCartney said in a Reader's Digest interview. "So that was like 200 days that we sat down to do that. And never had a dry moment."

Follow the link below to read the entire article in a new window:

http://blogs.hbr.org/research/2010/03/if-repeat-collaboration-kills.html?cm_mmc=npv-_-DAILY_ALERT-_-AWEBER-_-DATE

Andrew O'Connell is an editor with the Harvard Business Review Group.