Collaboration In The COVID Era

In the early 1900's Bell Labs laid the foundation for the research institution of the future. What they built, and how they built it, shaped research and development practices around the world. Mervin Kelly was one of the formidable characters who shaped the Lab's development and approach to new products. He believed, as Steve Jobs did as well, that in-person collaboration was nearly impossible to over-emphasize:

"Physical proximity, in Kelly's view, was everything. People had to be near one another. Phone calls alone wouldn't do. Kelly had even gone so far as to create 'branch laboratories at (partner) factories so that Bell Labs scientists could get more closely involved in the transition of their work from development to manufacture."

(Excerpt from the terrific history, "The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation," which I will likely be referencing for years to come. Sometime in the future, I'll make a special post about the design of Bell Labs' offices, which is worthy of consideration on its own.)

I've been pondering the impact of work-from-home on the prospects of innovation. Great innovators of the past didn't believe truly breakthrough work could be undertaken in a distributed manner. Mervin Kelly (instrumental in bringing the telephone to the mass market) believed, "Phone calls alone wouldn't do." Steve Jobs, as I mentioned in the post linked above, said, "Theres a temptation in our networked age to think that ideas can be developed by email and iChat... That's crazy. Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions. You run into someone, you ask what they're doing, you say, 'Wow,' and soon you're cooking up all sorts of ideas."

I don't know about you, but if there's one thing that's sorely lacking in the COVID era, it's spontaneous meetings and random discussions. I've wondered elsewhere about the challenge of the essential-work-only mindset that accompanies the distributed environment. To me, the danger of all the great quarterly earnings that tech companies are reporting belies a greater danger: that of long-term innovation stagnation. It's great that some companies are posting historic gains; but are they channeling those gains into inventing the future, 5-10 years out? I suspect few are thinking in terms of desirability in decades...

Click here to subscribe to Paint & Pipette, the weekly digest of these daily posts.