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Creative stars make disproportionately influential contributions to their fields. Yet we know little about how an innovator’s creative performance is affected by collaborating with stars. This paper studies the creative aspects of interpersonal collaboration from a distinct perspective: the quality of the collaborator. Both star and nonstar collaborators provide different benefits to a focal innovator. The innovator benefits from collaborating with nonstars because they may provide access to diverse information improving the outcome of the creative task at hand. In contrast, the focal innovator benefits from collaborating with stars because the focal innovator can also experience and learn from the star’s superior set of creative synthesis skills (which integrate diverse, sometimes contradictory ideas into new coherent and holistic solutions) and, thus, build lasting creative capabilities. Building on theoretical arguments about those …