Nowadays, highly-educated professionals need to be well able to work together in teams, because in the Western knowledge economy there is a need for fast and complex innovations which are too complex to be developed by individuals (Edmondson, 2012). However, little is known about how student characteristics influences students’ collaborative learning behavior in higher education. The goal of this study is to explore the relationship between students’ potential for excellence and their motivation and self-efficacy to work on a specific task and their motivation and self-efficacy to work together in groups. Third-year Sports, Management, and Business students of a Dutch University of Applied Sciences (N=130) were studied. These students worked together in groups of three students on the invention of a marketable product or service. Chi-square tests were performed to gain insight into the relationship between the aspects of potential excellence (intelligence, creativity, first-year GPA, and personality) and the aspects of motivation (task and collaborative) and self-efficacy (task and collaborative). The results show that personality plays the biggest role in explaining differences in motivation and self-efficacy. Intelligence and creativity play only a small role in explaining students’ motivation and self-efficacy. Implications will be discussed.