Collaboration is a key ingredient for business success: the survival of an organisation of any size or type depends on how effectively it operates as a collaborative ecosystem. But how is the nature of collaboration changing? And what should companies be doing to take advantage of technological developments that enable people to transcend time, place and space to work together?
These are the questions that the report Fluid Collaboration: Exploring the Future of Collaborative Work – prepared by meeting and learning technology company Avocor in partnership with WorkTech Academy – seeks to answer.
The report looks at the future of collaboration over the next five years, identifying key shifts in practice and critical success factors. It begins with a review of the importance of collaboration within the global knowledge economy, noting the environments and behaviours that create innovation, as described by management thinker Steven Johnson.
Key drivers and shifts
The report sets outs three key drivers of new forms of collaborative working:
1. Changing demographics: these require communication strategies to be re-evaluated for each generation, with particular emphasis on millennials and the digital natives who will form the main employee base in the future
2. The rise of sustainable cities: this is reducing the environmental impact of doing business and driving an increase in remote working solutions
3. Corporate space redesign: this is opening up the possibilities for dedicated, high- and low-intensity collaborative spaces within the context of agile and activity-based working.
It also identifies five major shifts, as collaboration increasingly takes place between companies (rather than within them), in dedicated spaces, on an ongoing, planned basis, and involving multiple participants working together at the same time.
The ‘Fluid’ concept
To address these shifts and enable organisations to benefit from the innovative ideas that flow from better collaborative processes, the report proposes a concept it calls ‘Fluid Collaboration’.
This has four main elements:
- Fluid Space, which explores new environments for complexity, modelling and immersion
- Fluid Tech, which increases the interoperability of communications and collaboration platforms, allowing them to be accessed and used on any device, over any network and from any location
- Fluid Culture, which supports a move away from paper to digital flow and introduces a new digital code of etiquette
- Fluid Intelligence, in which feedback data from unified collaboration platforms will give better insight into how the organisation really works.
The report concludes with two case studies that demonstrate ways in which the Fluid Collaboration approach can work, and a look forward to a future in which physical and virtual collaboration spaces begin to merge.
Fluid Collaboration: Exploring the Future of Collaborative Work is an insight report from Avocor in partnership with WORKTECH Academy. You can download the full report here