By Amanda Ramos And Jacob Simons
An overused word and an underexplored practice.
The word innovation continues to get thrown around. For the past decade at least, innovation has been a catch-all for that special sauce that gets companies to act first on the newest technologies and market opportunities. It’s considered the key to yet another buzzword: disruption. With the rules of startup culture in mind, businesses from big pharma to evolving finance have treated innovation as something they should aspire to. We find that when organizations particularly tell us they want to innovate, they usually mean they want design to be the hero by transforming their space. At first, they believe that their teams of experts will find a magic bullet inside war rooms, creative labs and collaboration spaces. But therein lies the gap: the expectation that innovation only comes about as a result of the right kind of space when there is so much more to it.
Innovation frenzy—everybody’s doing it.
There’s been an uptick in the building of accelerators, incubators, innovation labs—all kinds of terms for spaces that are in support of innovation. We’ve been calling it an innovation frenzy. There are precedents, wacky ideas and benchmarks about how to foster innovation in the workplace, but it’s important to look at what you’re trying to accomplish and what’s the best means to get you there.
Just as an example, we gathered some research about things that people are doing to spark innovation in the workplace and collected examples of over 60 unique physical interventions. We mapped them across a spectrum from the most direct, like an Einstein Room that screams “you will be a genius when you are in here,” to more indirect interventions, like bringing in views of nature so employees will have fresher thinking. Our biggest finding was that it is not just the physical dimension that leads to success, but (obviously) the people, culture and processes that take place there.