How to Enable “Water Cooler Innovation” for Remote Working Teams

The immediate economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are obvious — a falling stock market, decreased consumer spending, massive layoffs, and so on. Less obvious, but perhaps equally important, are the long-term impacts. And not just a few months from now. Economists are already wondering about the ripple effects decades into the future. For example, on a recent podcast, Stanford economist Nicholos Bloom made the following point:

I think another thing that’s going to be damaged in the long run, actually, is: if everyone’s working from home, there’s not going to be that kind of workplace discussions, coffee-table discussions, lunchtime talk. And most of that, it turns out, is important for long-run innovation… when you examine businesses or scientists or even the way I do my own research, a lot of that creativity comes from idle time and relaxed discussion with colleagues, and that’s all gone. So I also worry that five, 10 years out from now, we will see this as another lowering in long-run growth rate because we’ve taken a big hit to innovation.

Is this just one economist’s extemporaneous musing during a casual podcast interview, or is Bloom’s comment a prediction we should genuinely be concerned about? Ten years from now, long after the world has (hopefully) moved on from the coronavirus crisis, will…