A Proposal for a Standard With Innovation Management System

Claudia Erni Baumann, Frank Zoller and Roman Boutellier
structure is used. Also, a company can encourage informal encounters in the employees’ free
time, e.g. by providing sports facilities or by organizing cultural events. Pharma Inc. does not provide
the complete equipment needed to all research groups. They do this deliberately. Thus, if a
specific machine needs to be used, the researcher has to go to a central area where various machines
are pooled. The pooling can lead to chance encounters between researchers from different
disciplines. Breakfast meetings for all those in Building One are another example of a measure
that has led to various encounters: the various short presentations by the researchers in an
informal atmosphere during meetings leads to animated and spontaneous work-related conversations
after the meetings end.
� Architecture of the building in which the workplace is located Buildings can be designed in such a
way as to encourage encounters with different people, and not only with one’s direct colleagues.
The way in which corridors, workrooms and leisure rooms are designed and placed in relation to
one another influences the type and manner of encounters. The different floors within Building
One can either be accessed by elevator or by stairs. The walls of the stairwell are made of glass
and whoever uses the stairs must go through the working areas of other research groups.
� Physical proximity within and outside a cluster Campus- and cluster-like structures lead to a regional
aggregation of different companies or research institutions. These regional aggregations
can be described as areal networks which may increase the probability that researchers with similar
interests meet and start talking. In all of the buildings on the Pharma Inc. campus the infrastructure
which everyone uses is located on the ground floor. Also, restaurants, cafés and cafeterias
are located on one long road that crosses the campus.
� New Information Technology (IT) New technologies lead to the creation of new spheres of movement.
They enable encounters which, due to long distances, would otherwise not be possible.
Several social areas in Building One are connected to similar areas in buildings on other sites by
permanent videoconference channel – this means that these break rooms can transmit and receive
video and sound. Thus, the distances between different stories, buildings and countries can
be overcome.
When designing a new working environment, companies are increasingly focusing on communication
and encounters. Pharma Inc. and other companies are trying to use campus-like structures in order to
increase and utilize such correlations as described above, since the number of opportunities for a
(chance) encounter should be higher than in a “conventional” work environment.
4.2 In which sphere of interaction do chance encounters take place?
After analyzing the communication across the boundaries of the research group at ETH Zurich, it was
found that 44.4% of the chance encounters were conducted face-to-face (see Table 1), whereas all of
the others took place by phone, videoconferences, communication platforms and social networks. Of
the face-to-face chance encounters, 90.8% took place with people the researchers already knew.
Only 9.2% of the face-to-face chance encounters were meetings between people who did not know
each other.
Table 1: Spheres of interaction and their relative importance (causes of interactions)
Face-to-face
chance encounters
between people
who know each
other (90.8%)
Face-to-face
chance encounters
between people
who do notknow
each other (9.2%)
n=942
Workplace
Design
Organization
and Processes
SPHERES OF INTERACTION
Architecture Physical
Proximity
IT Total
44.4% of all chance encounters take place face-to-face 55.6%* 100%
38.8% 9.5% 49.2% 2.5% 100%
65.2% 4.4% 17.4% 13.0% 100%
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