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Thick dark clouds keep gathering over the concept of remote work.

A 2021 article published in the journal of Nature Human Behavior took a look at what happened at Microsoft when the company had shifted, firm-wide, to remote work during the first six months of the COVID pandemic in 2020.

The shift to remote work caused business groups within Microsoft to become less interconnected, rendering the internal collaborative networks more static and siloed.

Working from home, Microsoft employees did continue to collaborate with their colleagues around the company but the pattern of collaboration had changed. They were spending more time working with their strong ties — a pattern of collaboration better suited for transferring information — but less time interacting with their weak ties, a venue that is more likely to provide access to new information.

In other words, remote work at Microsoft — and I don’t think that Microsoft is an exception from a general rule — led to a pattern of collaboration that is less likely to result in generating novel, potentially innovative ideas.

Now another, just published, Nature article claims that remote collaboration produces fewer foundational (“disruptive”) discoveries than when the collaborators work together in person.

Is the “Return-to-Office” Policy a Sole Answer?

No wonder we’ve been seeing increasing attempts by organizations to phase out remote work and bring employees back to office — all under the banner of restoring the damaged pattern of employee collaboration.

Unfortunately, this forceful pattern of rebuilding carries a risk: a sizable chunk of corporate employees say they are unhappy with the mandatory return to offices and threaten to quit instead.

True, this might be more a threat than real action. But even if we force people back to their offices and make them communicate in person, will these unhappy people freely exchange creative ideas with other unhappy people?

I fully appreciate the role serendipitous encounters may play in the innovation process — a point many executives invoke when pushing for return to office — but I’m not convinced that corporate innovation must so much depend on a chance bumping of people into each other at a watercooler or in a bathroom.

An “Always-on” Internal Innovation Networks

We need to supplement in-person interactions with a system that would support employee collaboration regardless of their physical presence in the office.

In my view, such a system should meet two basic requirements:

• Be always-on. Corporate innovation struggles when run as a series of sequential “events” often followed by long pauses between them. Instead, corporate innovation must be a continuous flow of parallel innovation projects with fixed starts and finishes, so that at least a few are always active at any time.
• Be project-based. When it comes to innovation, employees must have a reason to collaborate (not just “exchange ideas”). In the corporate setting, this can be best achieved by solving specific, strategically important to the firm, problems.

A prototype for such a system already exists: I call it internal innovation networks, digital platforms that are specifically designed to harness the “collective wisdom” of an organization’s own employees to promote internal innovation programs.

What Can Internal Innovation Networks Do?

There are at least five important benefits that IINs can bring to any organization.

First, IINs provide a communication channel between different units and functions that often have no institutional structure to discuss strategic issues. By providing such a channel, IINs create a common intellectual space, which may improve, among other things, the decision-making process.

Second, by bringing together units and functions that are directly involved in the innovation process (such as R&D and marketing) with those that traditionally aren’t considered innovative (such as business development, finance, legal, or HR), IINs help foster a organization-wide culture of collaboration.

Many of you heard about the “not-invented-here syndrome,” an unfortunate habit of rejecting ideas and solutions that don’t originate within people’s own organizations. Yet not everyone perhaps realizes that this syndrome manifests not only as a rejection of external knowledge and expertise, but also as a resistance to intra-organizational collaboration, as the reluctance of individual units to share their findings with other units.

By breaking internal silos and promoting intra-organizational collaboration, IINs prepares the whole organization to accept innovative ideas regardless of their origin.

Third, IINs help identify the firm’s emerging thought leaders, who — especially in junior positions and geographically remote units — often remain unnoticed by the leadership. Because of their intrinsically democratic nature, IINs give voice to every employee regardless of their rank and geographical location in the company.

Hi, Can I Talk to Alice?

Fourth, IINs can be effectively used to find solutions to problems that individual units have failed to solve on their own.

Such a problem-solving capacity of IINs could be especially useful in multinational corporations with numerous units spread over distant geographic areas and time zones.

People in different units, often brought together as a result of M&A, rarely communicate with each other and almost never meet face-to-face. Yet, often one unit may possess specific knowledge that is desperately needed and can be immediately implemented in another.

Connecting the proverbial dots (or collecting low-hanging fruits, as I like to call it) through IINs can result in significant savings of time and money for internal R&D.

I witnessed such a low-hanging-fruit-collection process in action with a corporate client, a large pharmaceutical company.

The company adopted an internal crowdsourcing platform and was preparing to launch an inaugural set of problems on the company-wide portal specifically designed for this purpose.

One of the owners of this first set of problems was the head of the chemical synthesis group, a rising star in the Chemistry Department, whom I’ll call Alice. Her group was charged with optimizing the synthesis of a compound which was considered a high priority for the company’s drug development program.

Unfortunately, six months into the project, the group had made little progress towards its goal.

Initially, Alice was reluctant to post her problem to the platform. Ambitious and self-confident, she felt that admitting to other people in the company that she hadn’t found a solution by herself would hurt her professional reputation (and perhaps her up-to-this-point quite impressive career advancement).

But the fear of failing the project outright — and therefore potentially jeopardizing an important strategic initiative — outweighed all other considerations.

To Alice’s credit, having made the decision to crowdsource a solution to her problem, she didn’t look back. Her problem statement was a shining example of clarity and precision.

The payback was almost immediate: three days after Alice posted the problem statement on the internal crowdsourcing portal, she received a call. A person whom Alice never heard of before offered her exactly what her group had been looking for the past six months.

The person who solved the problem was a fellow scientist in the Chemistry Department, who’d joined the company only a couple months earlier. He had worked on a similar problem for his previous employer, the company’s competitor, and it took him little time to realize that the solution he found there was perfectly applicable to Alice’s case.

I also want to give credit to Alice’s boss, the head of the department. He made it very clear to Alice that he was happy with the outcome and that he appreciated Alice’s willingness to use whatever means available to come up with a successful solution instead of stubbornly trying to solve the problem all by herself.

The strength from within

Finally, IINs provide intellectual and operational support for the organization’s external innovation programs. Initially, they help identify and formulate problems whose solution would require external sources of knowledge and expertise. Later, they may facilitate testing and incorporating incoming external contributions.

One of the corporate clients I worked with in the past, a global agribusiness company, established a rule that each problem they wanted to solve by external crowdsourcing had to go through a round of internal crowdsourcing first — no exceptions.

This allowed the company to ensure that a solution to the problem didn’t already exist in one of its multiple divisions spread all over the world.

Using IINs first also allowed the company to better define the problem, to present it in the form most suitable for external crowdsourcing.

Moreover, the discussions that would arise during the process helped the company’s leadership identify locations that would benefit the most from the future solution — along with the employees who could be recruited for analyzing and implementing incoming solutions.

Unfortunately, some organizations launch external crowdsourcing campaigns before engaging internal crowds.

The result is often disappointing: lacking internal support, external ideas and solutions are often met with stiff resistance from inside the company. Their implementation gets stalled, then tacitly boycotted, and eventually rejected.

To add insult to injury, such outcomes give additional ammunition to naysayers, who jump at the opportunity to claim that “open innovation doesn’t work for us.”

I don’t want to say, of course, that organizations should postpone experimenting with open innovation until they establish and perfect the art of using INNs (which may take years).

My point is that the full potential of open innovation for any organization can only be realized by the concerted effort of connected employees capable of identifying and defining their own needs.

Or, said differently, the power of open innovation comes from the strength within.