Innovation is crucial to a company’s survival in today’s fiercely competitive and ever-evolving market. It gives you an advantage in a world where marketplaces and growing startups result in making profit much more challenging. Collaboration, creativity, execution, and value generation are all required for innovation, not just in any form. Research from The Great Business Schools states “on average, an in-person meeting will generate about 13.36 ideas, whereas a virtual meeting will only generate around 10.43?” These four skills are exemplified during in-person breakout sessions, where team members are actively engaged in the creation and demonstration of each component. Ideas are discussed and strategies could be replicated to deliver powerful outcomes.
Collaboration involves more than just teamwork and opening up the floor to the entire group. Collaboration is strategically facilitated and denotes the capacity for collaborative thought and action on challenging tasks. The procedures needed to alter our economy cannot be modeled on the traditional approach to strategic planning. Instead, strategic “doing” provides a structure for getting things done. Open innovation means thinking in groups. According to the Washington Post “Research shows face-to-face requests are 34 times more effective than those sent by email, and that a physical handshake promotes cooperation and influences negotiation outcomes for the better.”
Four Ideas, we ask ourselves:
- What can we accomplish as a team? Listen and find out.
- Learn and adapt—How will we do it in tandem?
- What should we do as a group to focus and align?
- What will we do together using link and leverage?
Research published today in Nature found that “video calls, as opposed to in-person meetings, reduce creative collaboration and the generation of novel ideas. The results indicate that while the mental cogs keep running more or less smoothly when working remotely, group innovation might be hindered”. In order to create and solve a shared problem or chase a shared opportunity, individuals must come together and contribute their different expertise, skills, experience, and resources.