Old school innovation: An Olin prof’s perspective

In a world of Skype meetings, virtual offices, and conversations over collaboration tools such as Slack, is it time to consider moving back to real-world brainstorming around a white board—with an in-house cartoonist to help?

That’s the philosophy of Filament, a downtown St. Louis collaboration space profile recently by HEC-TV, the independent educational channel, as part of its “Innovations” series. In a piece entitled “Meetings Go Back to the Future,” the network highlights the founder of Filament Matt Homann, whose business model is based on the philosophy that “corporate meetings suck.”

HEC interviewed Andrew Knight, associate professor of organizational behavior, for a researcher’s perspective on Filament, which “designs, hosts, and facilitates amazing meetings, conferences, retreats” for corporate clients—complete with plenty of board games on the shelves, Play-Doh on the tables, a giant white board, and a on-staff cartoonist to graphically represent ideas.

“This is an interesting cycle that we see in many businesses that today are actually moving back to bringing folks in house, drifting away from maybe an emphasis on virtual work,” Knight says in the video. “We’ve now had a period of time where maybe we can see some of the challenges that that’s brought.”

Watch more in the attached video.

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