Collaboration Revolution - Advancing Collaboration for the Future of Work - Blog & Research

Engineering Serendipity Into Innovation | Innovation Insights | Wired.com

Written by Brandon Klein | Mar 18, 2014 6:22:10 PM

Very few companies have pursued deliberate strategies for parallel innovation with multiple teams. Primary deterrent is the cost involved. When justifiable, use of internal competitions that recognize and encourage collaboration can often lead to superior outcomes.

Global corporations setup multiple locations for their research labs primarily to leverage regional talent pools and labor cost advantages. However, all the locations are typically under the same line management and work on different problems. So the opportunity to exploit multiple viewpoints is lost. Diverse views of the future from autonomous research labs can often be synthesized into superior work plans during planning. Execution plans for various labs could still be coordinated to ensure alignment and justification in case of overlaps.