Chance Encounters: Where do They Take Place and What is the Benefit?

Buildings facilitate or inhibit physical movement and also foster or hinder communication. The design of a building influences the interactions between the employees and thus supports or hinders the flow of information. Therefore it enhances the trust between the employees, promotes the coordination of work, facilitates projects within an organization and supports knowledge transfer and knowledge creation. All of these factors are particularly essential for innovation-driven research oriented companies. Places where chance encounters and discussions can take place are crucial for communication between employees. By creating such places in a thought-out manner, creativity and innovation activities can be increased. Based on a single case study research, we examined the behavior of the members of a research team (n=20) before and after moving from a traditional cell space research and work environment into a modern multi-space research environment. On the one hand, we tried to determine where creative ideas come from and on the other hand, we explored the events and places where chance encounters occur. In this context, chance encounters were defined as coincidental meetings between people who do not work in the same research group. The results show that new ideas in a research environment emerge from an iterative process: both discussions between researchers and deep individual reflection are important for innovative ideas. Chance encounters mostly occur during coffee breaks or lunch. The new multi-space work environment has led to more chance encounters, because first, the employees use the same infrastructure and second, the walking paths of the employees intersect more and last but not least, the employees are often forced to pass by the infrastructure used by the employees of other research groups. The findings imply that a stimulating work environment provides both an area for the employees to be social and spontaneously engage in unplanned meetings and an area where they can retreat, be alone and concentrate. The design of research buildings and workplaces is a significant factor in increasing chance encounters. But architecture alone is not enough. The proposed framework is a useful tool for business professionals like knowledge managers, innovation managers or architects when designing a creativity and innovation promoting environment.