The Profound Influence of Small Choices in Digital Collaboration

Simple decisions about how to use collaboration tools can set teams on a path toward either incremental or breakthrough innovations.

Wietske Van Osch and Burcu Bulgurcu

September 12, 2023

The Research

• The authors studied communications among 215 different groups — of which 109 were public groups and 106 were private — at a large manufacturing company that was using a digital collaboration platform.
• They used a machine learning algorithm to classify the 28,083 conversations within those groups as evidence of either developmental creativity (via the combination or expansion of existing concepts) or disruptive creativity (via reframing problems to reach a novel solution).
• They ...