A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

4. Findings
Claudia Erni Baumann, Frank Zoller and Roman Boutellier
In the following sections, we present a classification of the different places within an environment and
events where work-related encounters take place. Further quantitative data allows a prioritization of
the classification of the different places from a managerial point of view.
4.1 Spheres of interaction shape encounters
The number and occasion of encounters during working hours are influenced by potential communication
partners and by different spheres of interaction (see Figure 1).Potential communication partners
are those whom an employee has a probability of meeting during working hours. This encounter
occurs due to the function or role of the potential communication partner,e.g. an employee stays in
contact with customers during the working day or the employee has to clarify regulatory affairs with
authorities.
People are affected by and are dependent on the environment in which they are located. They are
associated with different systems – spheres of interaction – which have their own rules and which influence
each other. There is interplay both between the different spheres of interaction and each employee,
and between spheres of interaction and potential conversation partners. A new building is an
example of this interplay: the new architecture has an influence on the workflow which is linked to the
organization of the work. Due to the building, the work itself changes. All of these changes can lead to
an alteration in the characteristics of encounters and to new types of encounters between the employees,
or even to newly formed contacts with clients. Thus the dependence of potential communication
partners on different spheres of interaction – and vice-versa – is a dynamic process. The results
of this process are (chance) encounters.
Figure 1: Impact on encounters: spheres of interaction and potential communication partners
As can been seen in Figure 1, important spheres of interaction are:
� Workplace Design The workspace design directly influences encounters with other people: visibility,
lighting, acoustics and furnishing all influence the amount of face-to-face contact with colleagues.
In the newly constructed Building One, the employees of several hierarchical levels
share the same space. From the outside, one cannot tell who is in a managerial position and who
is not.
� Organization and processes during work Workflow design also influences encounters because
the people with whom one has a spontaneous meeting are dependent on how the available infra-
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