Running innovation with distributed and hybrid teams

Distributed teams can innovate well if you stop trying to copy the in-person workshop onto a screen. Split the work by what it needs: generating ideas and building shared understanding benefit most from being together, while research, individual ideation, evaluation and testing work well apart. Then keep one shared record that everyone works in, so the project does not live in one person's head or one city's meeting room.

This article is about the operating rhythm of a distributed innovation effort over weeks and months. For running a single remote or hybrid session, see remote and hybrid workshops people stay awake in.

What the evidence says, and what it does not

The most cited study here is by Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Levav, published in Nature in 2022. In a laboratory experiment, and in a field study with around 1,500 engineers at a multinational telecommunications company, across sites in Europe, the Middle East and South Asia, pairs who met by video generated fewer ideas than pairs who met in person. The authors linked this to narrower visual focus on the screen. When it came to choosing which idea to pursue, the video pairs did no worse.

Two practical lessons follow. First, protect in-person time for divergent work, where the difference shows up. Second, do not assume everything suffers remotely; selection, review and decisions can work well online. The study looked at pairs and short tasks, so treat it as a guide to where to spend your together-time, not a rule for everything.

Step-by-step: setting up a distributed innovation rhythm

1. Sort the work into together and apart

List the activities your project needs, then decide for each one whether it needs the team in the same room, the same call, or neither.

2. Plan in-person moments as anchors, not habits

You probably cannot fly everyone in every week. Plan one or two anchor gatherings per project: at the start, to frame the challenge and build the team, and at the point where research turns into ideas. Everything else runs remotely between them. Book anchors early, because travel approvals take longer than design work.

3. Make asynchronous work the default

Most distributed innovation fails because every step waits for the next meeting. Move individual work out of meetings. Use brainwriting so people write ideas in their own time before anyone discusses them, and Crazy 8s sketches that can be photographed and posted. Meetings then become for building, deciding and unblocking.

4. Use local research and share it raw

A distributed team is an advantage in research: you have people in several places who can observe users in context. A diary study runs naturally across sites. Ask researchers to share raw notes and photos the same day, not polished summaries a week later, so the whole team sees the same evidence. Then cluster findings together with affinity grouping in a shared space.

5. Keep one record that everyone works in

Hybrid teams split into two quiet groups: the people at headquarters who talk in corridors, and everyone else who reads about it later. The answer is one shared record where the work actually happens: the canvases, the evidence, the decisions and who contributed what. If a decision was made in a corridor, it is not made until it is written there.

6. Make roles explicit

In a room, roles sort themselves out. Across sites, they do not. Use a simple RACI for the project: who facilitates, who owns the research in each location, who decides at each gate. Rotate facilitation across sites so leadership of the work is not always at headquarters.

7. Respect time zones and calendars

Find the overlap window and protect it for live work. Rotate inconvenient slots so the same site is not always on at night. In multinational teams, check working weeks: a team in Saudi Arabia works Sunday to Thursday while a European team works Monday to Friday, leaving four shared working days. Build your rhythm around those.

8. Vote and decide in ways that are fair at a distance

Selection works online, but it needs structure. Dot voting done individually and revealed together avoids people copying the loudest site. Give remote participants the same materials and time as those in the room.

9. Run short, regular retrospectives

Every two weeks, hold a 30-minute retrospective on how the team is working, not just what it is producing. Ask specifically whether anyone feels outside the loop. Distance problems rarely announce themselves; they show up as silence.

Illustrative example

Illustrative. An international humanitarian organisation set up a small innovation team to redesign how field offices request emergency supplies. The team had members in Geneva, Nairobi, Amman and Manila.

They met in person once, in Nairobi, for three days to frame the problem and visit a warehouse. After that, each site ran a two-week diary study with local logistics staff. Raw entries went into the shared record daily. The team clustered findings in two live sessions scheduled in the Amman–Geneva–Nairobi overlap, with Manila joining one and contributing asynchronously to the other.

Ideas were generated by brainwriting over three days. The team met in person a second time, in Amman, to combine and prototype. Selection and testing ran remotely. The Manila office, which had the least live time, proposed the idea that was eventually piloted. It had been written up in full in the shared record, so nobody needed to be in the room to see its strength.

Do's and don'ts

Do

• Spend your in-person time on framing and building on ideas.
• Make individual, written work the default before discussion.
• Keep every decision and contribution in one shared record.
• Rotate facilitation and inconvenient meeting times across sites.
• Ask in every retrospective who feels out of the loop.

Don't

• Run an eight-hour workshop on a video call and call it hybrid.
• Let headquarters decide in the corridor and inform the rest later.
• Wait for the next meeting to move each step forward.
• Treat the remote participants in a hybrid session as an audience.
• Assume one study settles everything about remote creativity.

Questions people ask

Can a remote team do design thinking? Yes. Research, individual ideation, evaluation and testing all work remotely. Plan in-person time for framing the problem and building on ideas together, where research suggests being in the same room helps most.

How do you keep a hybrid innovation team equal? Put all work in one shared record, give remote people the same materials and time, rotate facilitation across sites, and treat any decision taken in a corridor as not yet made until it is written down where everyone can see it.

Is brainstorming worse on video calls? A 2022 study by Brucks and Levav in Nature found video pairs generated fewer ideas than in-person pairs, but selected between ideas just as well. Silent, written ideation before any call reduces the problem.

Where to go next

For the bigger picture of what a lab is for, read what an innovation lab is, and why most fail, and if your lab has no single home, an innovation lab without a building. The method guides that work best across distance are brainwriting, the diary study, affinity grouping and the retrospective.