Innovation and Co-location
My team and I have been doing some interviews recently for our final project. We are trying to understand how different organizations come up with innovative ideas. We wanted to see whether aha! moments are only happy accidents or a product of the process.
Interestingly enough, we found out that the single most mentioned innovation source in our interviews was the random hallway conversation. We discovered that creativity sparks during lunch conversations or when employees sneak into someone else’s screen. Once meetings are over, employees have a chance to quickly chat in the hallway and jump into others. It looks like virtual teams could miss a lot of these opportunities. Once the Telepresence meeting is over, there is no chance to quickly chat about something or grab something for lunch.