Learning From Innovation Hubs: Fluidity, Serendipity, and Community Combined

According to a recent article in Innovation Management, innovation hubs are popping up all over the world and are quickly becoming the go-to place for collaborative innovation. These hubs combine elements of co-working spaces, innovation labs, and business incubators and aim to foster innovation by promoting learning, sharing ideas, and community. The most prominent example is Impact Hub, which already has 54 locations globally with 20 more in the making. Innovation hubs vary in their approaches and strategies, but some of their key features include embracing fluidity and diversity to increase their creative potential, focusing on impact to motivate people to be creative, emphasizing serendipity to create opportunities for unplanned collaborations and networking, creating a shared sense of community to overcome innovation obstacles such as fear of failure, intensifying collaborative innovation to pursue new ideas consistently, and enabling innovation by providing the space for entrepreneurship to live and be experienced. Innovation managers can adapt these approaches and strategies to create more inspiring and conducive environments for innovation.