Innovation under Hybrid Work Arrangements: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

Hybrid work has become a settled feature of knowledge work, yet what it means for innovation is still taking shape. Innovation is widely understood as a deeply social process that depends on informal interaction, trust, and the unplanned exchanges that physical co-presence makes possible. Hybrid arrangements may weaken these conditions, but they also open new possibilities, such as broader access to expertise and lower coordination costs for routine work. With some distance from the pandemic and the more stable arrangements that organisations have since chosen, this study explores how the people whose work centres on innovation perceive these changes. The research question asks how innovation practitioners perceive the way hybrid work affects innovation. The study takes a qualitative, abductive approach. Twelve semi-structured interviews were conducted with innovation practitioners, including managers, designers, engineers, consultants, and intermediaries across a range of industries, and analysed thematically. Social capital theory provides the central lens, complemented by literature on the phases of innovation, informal interaction, and serendipity. The findings suggest that practitioners perceive hybrid work not as simply good or bad for innovation 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 later development and execution were felt to tolerate it more easily. Second, it reshapes the relational dimension of innovation work, with respondents describing a loss of spontaneous interaction and finding trust and psychological safety harder to establish. Third, the strength of these effects appears to depend on surrounding conditions, most importantly leadership culture and workplace infrastructure. Fourth, hybrid arrangements were also seen to strengthen certain capacities, notably routine access to distant expertise and the scale of digital innovation processes. The study contributes a practitioner-grounded perspective to a developing area of research and offers practical implications for organising innovation work in hybrid settings.