Informal Interaction, Coffee Breaks, & Innovation

Years ago, in the late 1990s, I was talking to a retired HP executive about the great days he remebered at HP Labs, and he commented that one of the best parts of working there were the coffee breaks, when researchers would come out of their labs and offices to share a cup of coffee. He thought that those twice-a-day times of informal interaction were one of the big contributors the HP Labs' innovativeness.

Well, I just finished reading Steve Wozniak's new autobiography, iWoz, and he says exactly the same thing of his time there in 1973: "Every day, at 10:00 am and 2:00 pm they wheeled in donuts and coffee. That was so nice. And smart, because the reasons they did it was so everyone would gather in a common place and be able to talk, socialize, and exchange ideas."

For HP Labs the story takes an interesting twist. The retired exec I was talking with went on to blame the downfall of HP Labs on the small, personal coffee machines that became common in the 1980s, because once they became cheap and widely available, people stopped coming to the coffee break. Pretty soon HP stopped the formal coffee and donuts, and as a result the frequency of informal interaction declined, and so eventually did the innovation output of the Labs.