I dunno...I think it may be more that doing it alone increases the risk that a project may fail, but also increases its innovativeness if it succeeds. I'm reminded of Steve Wozniak's "Work alone" quote:
It seems that basically all truly innovative projects either came out of a single mind or of a small team that worked so closely together that they might as well have been one mind. There seems to be a regression-to-the-mean effect as you add more people to a project: you eliminate truly bad ideas, but you also eliminate some truly good ones too. Many ideas that look bad are really just different.
In some ways, I think this unfortunate, because working on a team is a lot more fun, IMHO, than working solo. But that seems to be the tradeoff.
I think you would get the same effect. It's not because of direct interference: I've seen it happen even when the extra "cooks" do everything they can to encourage innovation. It's because there's a natural tendency to self-censor your more "out there" ideas when you know there are people watching. In order to let them bloom, you usually need a safe, private environment where you can try out lots of things that don't work before you condense on one that does.
http://www.dailycommonsense.com/apples-steve-wozniak-work-al...
It seems that basically all truly innovative projects either came out of a single mind or of a small team that worked so closely together that they might as well have been one mind. There seems to be a regression-to-the-mean effect as you add more people to a project: you eliminate truly bad ideas, but you also eliminate some truly good ones too. Many ideas that look bad are really just different.
In some ways, I think this unfortunate, because working on a team is a lot more fun, IMHO, than working solo. But that seems to be the tradeoff.