“Thinking outside the box” is an idea that has been around for a long time. But with the advent of new digital tools for business operations, it is easier to find new ways to collaborate in an office environment to find better ways of achieving business goals.

According to research in the MIT Sloan Management Review, a research-based magazine and digital platform for business executives published at the MIT Sloan School of Management, understanding how digital tools can spur creativity allows managers and employees to foster innovation.

“Much like physical office designs have changed over the years to spur employee innovation from walled cubicles to open environments, so too are there choices in digital collaboration tools with important implications for members of public channels and private groups,” said Wietske Van Osch, Canada Research Chair in Enterprise Social Media and Digital Collaboration at HEC Montreal and an associate professor at Michigan State University, in a media release about the findings.

What seems like a simple decision — making a private group or a public group via collaboration tools — can set teams on different paths toward either incremental or breakthrough innovations.

Even the use of well-known and widely adopted digital tools such as Slack and Teams give employees choices on ways to collaborate in either public or private channels that provide inherent possibilities for distinct paths to produce different creative outcomes, the release states.

Developmental creativity involves combining or expanding existing concepts to produce new outcomes. In these instances, collaborating in public channels has been found to be more pertinent. Disruptive creativity, which involves the creative destruction of an object or problem so that a new view of the object or problem emerges, is more likely to grow from groups that set communications to private, according to the research.

Managers need to act and think strategically, combining different features of collaboration tools in use with the appropriate communication structures, to reap the best benefits. Here are three points for managers to consider in doing so:

• Choose collaboration tools that allow both public and private spaces;
• Consider how to support private groups that they cannot see or monitor and how to make the knowledge embedded in these groups available to the broader organization;
• Combine different groups to create multiple pathways to different types of creativity.

“Leaders need to be mindful that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to innovation. What is most effective depends on the scope of ambition and the stage of the innovation process. They must empower users to blend and embrace multiple paths to creativity, and leverage these paths for maximizing the creative potential of their digital workforce,” said Burcu Bulgurcu, an assistant professor and Rogers Cybersecure Catalyst research fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University’s Ted Rogers School of Management, in the release.

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 identified instances of bridging and bonding from the network data embedded in the platform. In combining the insights about transparent versus private settings, and bridging versus bonding ties, the authors identified two distinct paths that led to either developmental creativity or disruptive creativity.

SOURCE: MIT Sloan Management Review