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Problem definition : Is teamwork better than working alone for creating breakthrough inventions? We challenge the widely accepted affirmative answer to this question. Academic/practical relevance : Extant research has consistently found that lone inventors significantly underperform teams in creating breakthroughs; thus it extols the benefits of teamwork while neglecting the role of single inventors. This paper offers an important counterweight to those empirical results by identifying a fundamental contingency under which teams might or might not outperform lone inventors: the degree of decomposability of the invention. By ignoring this contingency, past literature has systematically underestimated the role that lone inventors can play for companies. Methodology : We use utility and design patent data for 1985–2009 to compare the effect—on the probability of creating a breakthrough—of working alone versus …