Defining "collaboration" before the product existed

An argument about a word, with product money behind it

Long before "hybrid work" was a phrase, Intel's PC group had argued itself to a standstill over what "collaboration" even meant. Roadmaps, investments, and hardware bets years out all hinged on a definition nobody could agree on — and the stakes were the company's read on the future of how people would work together.

From the field to a definition, in eight weeks

Rather than argue in the abstract, the study went to where the work happened — real offices, real teams — then widened the aperture step by step until the finding was both grounded and generalizable.

Collaboration is a human process, not a feature

The reframe was simple and consequential: collaboration wasn't a set of features to ship but a human process technology should support rather than drive. That foundational definition — grounded in how people actually shared attention, space, and work — became the anchor for a new company-wide UX roadmap and gave engineering and marketing a shared language to build against.

A definition that shipped hardware

The work produced four patent filings and helped seed a joint venture with Microsoft — the Surface Hub, which went on to become a multi-billion-dollar product line. Along the way it shaped C-suite investment across $100M+ revenue verticals and five major bets (big-data AI, AR/VR, high-performance computing among them), cut time-to-market by 20% across the innovation pipeline, and lifted cross-division research adoption by 35% — the investment cases argued directly to Intel's executives.

The most useful thing research can do for a roadmap is settle what a word actually means. — the lesson of the study