Innovation under Hybrid Work Arrangements: A Qualitative Study

Sammanfattning

Hybrid work has become a settled feature of knowledge work, yet what it means forinnovation is still taking shape. Innovation is widely understood as a deeply social processthat depends on informal interaction, trust, and the unplanned exchanges that physicalco-presence makes possible. Hybrid arrangements may weaken these conditions, but theyalso open new possibilities, such as broader access to expertise and lower coordination costsfor routine work. With some distance from the pandemic and the more stable arrangementsthat organisations have since chosen, this study explores how the people whose work centreson innovation perceive these changes. The research question asks how innovationpractitioners perceive the way hybrid work affects innovation.The study takes a qualitative, abductive approach. Twelve semi-structured interviews wereconducted with innovation practitioners, including managers, designers, engineers,consultants, and intermediaries across a range of industries, and analysed thematically. Socialcapital theory provides the central lens, complemented by literature on the phases ofinnovation, informal interaction, and serendipity.The findings suggest that practitioners perceive hybrid work not as simply good or bad forinnovation but as a trade-off they navigate. Four broad patterns run through their accounts.First, hybrid work appears to shape the phases of innovation differently, with the early,exploratory phase of idea generation seen as the most exposed to distance, while laterdevelopment and execution were felt to tolerate it more easily. Second, it reshapes therelational dimension of innovation work, with respondents describing a loss of spontaneousinteraction and finding trust and psychological safety harder to establish. Third, the strengthof these effects appears to depend on surrounding conditions, most importantly leadershipculture and workplace infrastructure. Fourth, hybrid arrangements were also seen tostrengthen certain capacities, notably routine access to distant expertise and the scale ofdigital innovation processes. The study contributes a practitioner-grounded perspective to adeveloping area of research and offers practical implications for organising innovation workin hybrid settings.