How to Connect Colleagues to Improve Innovation

I was watching my daughter playing with Lego tiles the other day. She was creating a new structure. One with a combination of tiles that had never -probably- been arranged in that exact form and order by no one else before, and perhaps never again in the future. And I remembered when I was studying Innovation Management at the Science Policy Research Unit (SPRU) , a few decades ago, and my dear professor John Bessant .

During a class, he came in with a box full of Lego tiles, we were split in groups of three or four, and we were expected to make “a helicopter” out of the available tiles. No further instructions were given. Our young imagination went wild. We created some plausible, realistic models but also -a lot of- imaginary, impossible, funny, unreliable, extraordinary ones, that made us all lough when we were explaining the “logic” behind their design.

And I remember that each and every collective model had multiple contributors. Some, like Ralph Schirner, were contributing in the structural side. Others, like Polyxeni Emmanouilidou , in the design part. Others, like Alexander Riobo Patino in the constructional order. Whereas ones, like Michele Coletti and Eduardo Remolins , in the selection and economy of the tiles. A few, like Stephen Kennedy , were coordinating or encouraging us to finish in time, or, like Ali Hauser Askalani , were selected to present the results because of their communication skills.

What was clear in the end, was that no single team would have been able to finish their model on time had we been left alone to make the helicopters on our own, without the collaborative effect of our peers.

For John Bessant , this was a way to show us how innovation is managed in an organization, when colleagues with different skills and backgrounds cooperate, or are supposed to cooperate, to bring a project to fruition, from zero to one.

But for us, the students, it was a masterclass on collaboration. We had very little experience about organizations and their innovation processes at the time to appreciate the innovation management angle of the class, but we had enough experience to acknowledge that, given the task, collaboration was everything.

Years later, when the pandemic hit, I realized that the aspect of #collaboration was only part of the lecture. The actual value of the exercise was #connection! The shared experience, the distribution of skills and the common goal, created a lifelong bond between us that would have been very difficult, if not impossible, to create otherwise. One of the key factors to create this connection was the fact that the teams were randomly selected, which allowed for a random distribution of skills and competences to be present in each team.

This subconscious apprehension resurfaced in a different form during the pandemic. When everyone was spending their days alone or with family at home, what was missing was not the day-to-day meetings with our teams and friends. We actually had that, albeit remotely, through the various online channels of communication. What was truly missing was the random acquaintances, the new connections, the unnecessary dialogues, the spontaneous interactions.

And it was the realization of this shortcoming, this deficiency, that made me conceive and create Coremoting . Because I realized then that, in the #futureofwork, there would be fewer chances of random interactions, because of the hybrid work arrangements that would proliferate. Indeed, as I discussed in a previous article, the chances to meet and interact with a random colleague drop dramatically in hybrid settings, and it becomes very challenging for one to make friendships outside their immediate team.

So why not just bring everybody back to the office?

As Michael Arena demonstrates in his latest article:

"Dragging employees back to the office won’t magically spark innovation".

The reason is simple: There are new habits in town.

Many employees now:

1. are spending more time with their families

2. have invested in improving their home-work-spaces

3. have invested in new bigger homes

4. hate the commute

5. want less distractions

6. do not know otherwise (entered the workforce during the pandemic)

The new lifestyle is flexible and requires thoughtful and intentional policies to connect employees. Not just “an office”.

Employees conceptualize the modern workplace as a distributed abstract space, whose “old school” manifestation is the office. But they are equally comfortable to work from the office, from their home, from someone else's home, or from third workplaces. Yet, they still crave social interaction.

And social interaction is the melting pot of modern innovation. Patent trends corroborate this assumption. In the 1990s, the average number of inventors per patent was below 2. In the last 20 years, this number has gradually climbed towards 3. This could be because of the growing complexity of technological advancements but also due to the collaborative nature of R&D departments.

But collaboration in a closed system has a finite horizon. Team-level agreements, as Brian Elliott advocates, do work for maintaining collaboration within a team. But collaboration in a closed system has a finite horizon. It is the osmotic effect of external interactions that creates an infinite canvas of creativity. And to achieve this, one is required to have an infinite canvas of connectivity.

And offsites and company events can play a role, but 1. not everyone is comfortable to participate and 2. the frequency of such events cannot be high.

Coremoting is offering a path to such connectivity canvas. By connecting colleagues based on not work-related criteria to co-work from home, an influx of ideas, spaces, and relationships is enabled, under the control and implicit trust structure of the organization.

Connecting colleagues through the Coremoting matching platform and physically co-working from home during the Coremoting sessions can vertically lift off innovation, and, this time, not with imaginary Lego helicopters.