Pairs as pivots of innovation: how collaborative sensemaking benefits from innovating in twos

Abstract

Innovation is a collective and collaborative act. Even though ideas germinate in individuals’ minds, they need social interaction to be improved and brought to realisation. Therefore, much attention is now being paid to team collaboration as an organisational essential for innovation. Collaboration facilitates the combining of perspectives, competencies, and resources. However, it has been shown that limits arise when it comes to converging views into a shared perspective and its interpretation. Innovation is not all about pooling competencies and resources but also about immersion and reflection. It is a process of collaborative sensemaking that benefits from intimate and close collaboration. In this paper, we investigate how collaboration between twos, before an idea is shared with a large team, could facilitate the later collaborative sensemaking process through which the larger team must pass in bringing the innovation to reality. Through a laboratory experiment, we prove how collaborating in a close relationship in a pair has a positive impact on collaborative sensemaking in a subsequent collaborative effort in a larger team setting. In particular, we demonstrate how the pair acts as a pivot in the larger team and accelerates the rate of growing perception and understanding of the innovative idea.