> In a laboratory experiment conducted at Stanford, half the teams worked together in person and half did so online. The in-person teams generated 15% to 20% mo

> In a laboratory experiment conducted at Stanford, half the teams worked together in person and half did so online. The in-person teams generated 15% to 20% more ideas than their virtual counterparts. In a separate experiment involving almost 1,500 engineers at a multinational corporation, in-person teams came up with more ideas, and those ideas received higher ratings for originality. >The researchers say they’ve identified a reason online meetings generated fewer good ideas: When people focus on the narrow field of vision of a screen, their thinking becomes narrower as well. “If your visual field is narrow, then your cognition is likely to be as well,” Levav says. “For creative idea generation, narrowed focus is a problem.” >In contrast, people who meet in person get creative stimulation by visually wandering around the space they’re in, which makes them more likely to cognitively wander as well. “In a video interaction, you need to fix your gaze at the screen because otherwise you’re projecting to your partner that you’re looking at something else and distracted,” Levav says. But that distraction is actually useful when it comes to sparking ideas. “If you think about disruptive ideas, they come from putting together broad concepts that are seemingly unrelated.”