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One of the primary reasons organizations utilize project teams is to encourage members with diverse intellectual resources to produce novel associations that give rise to creative solutions. When creative sparks fly, learning, innovation and superior performance are often the result. However, in this paper we argue that creative sparks often create heat of another sort—frustration resulting from unfocused effort and diminished productivity. Utilizing Gersick's (1988) punctuated equilibrium model of project team development as a theoretical foundation, we argue that the meaning and impact of novel contributions change during a project team's life cycle. Novel contributions are beneficial to a project team early in its development when its primary goals are to learn more about a problem, search for useful information, and articulate tentative solutions. After the midpoint transition, when a team's attention shifts toward …