Out With The Old, In With The New: GSK's Smart Workplace

By Trisha Gladd, Editor, Life Science Connect

By eliminating the confines of the traditional workspace, companies can encourage better employee interaction and collaboration. Will this be the key for an industry counting on innovation to lead it into the future?

In Steven Johnson’s best-selling book, Where Good Ideas Come From, he describes how good ideas come in a “slow hunch” and not in a sudden moment of inspiration. While some ideas may be useful in the immediate moment, others need to be stored and cultivated for a long period of time before they can actually become effective. “Good ideas normally come from the collision of smaller hunches so that they form something bigger than themselves,” says Johnson in a YouTube video about the slow hunch concept. “When ideas take form in this hunch state, they need to collide with other hunches. Oftentimes, the thing that turns a hunch into a real breakthrough is another hunch that’s lurking in somebody else’s mind. You have to figure out a way to create systems that allow those hunches to come together and turn into something bigger than the sum of their parts.”