We snapped Innovation Places’ Curtis McLean and Siobhan Harold Fink on a visit to our offices recently. These folks are working to take the mystery out of how corporations should set up office space and manage their portfolios of properties. Corporate real estate execs have been making decisions based on hunches and trends: whether to go with an open workspace or traditional office, whether to consolidate employees or spread across multiple locations. Innovation Places, though, taps a company's own data to track worker productivity and see what's really working. Though companies tend to look at short-term real estate solutions to save money, Curtis says, the work done within a building is worth 20 to 30 times the cost of the real estate.

Innovation Places' tracking of one client's three-month transformation from a siloed workspace to an interdisciplinary one is charted above. The startup began as an internal project for Pfizer’s Global Operations Center for Excellence, and then the project team decided to strike out on their own. Now, the six Innovation Places principals operate from offices in Shelton, Conn., Paris, and London, advising clients from small shops to Fortune 500s.