But did the IAS actually succeed? Off-hand, the only thing I can think of them for was hosting Einstein in his crankish years, Kurt Godel before he want crazy, and Von Neumann's work on a real computer (which they disliked and wanted to get rid of). Richard Hamming, who might know, said:

When you are famous it is hard to work on small problems. This is what did Shannon in. After information theory, what do you do for an encore? The great scientists often make this error. They fail to continue to plant the little acorns from which the mighty oak trees grow. They try to get the big thing right off. And that isn't the way things go. So that is another reason why you find that when you get early recognition it seems to sterilize you. In fact I will give you my favorite quotation of many years. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, in my opinion, has ruined more good scientists than any institution has created, judged by what they did before they came and judged by what they did after. Not that they weren't good afterwards, but they were superb before they got there and were only good afterwards.

(My own thought is to wonder if this is kind of a regression to the mean, or perhaps regression due to aging.)