Mural acquires LUMA Institute, establishes leadership in collaborative intelligence

SAN FRANCISCO — March 28, 2022 — MURAL, the leading provider of digital workspaces for guided visual collaboration, announced today that it has acquired LUMA Institute (LUMA), a recognized global leader that equips people to be collaborative problem solvers through its acclaimed learning experiences, digital resources, and certification programs. LUMA transforms how teams collaborate and innovate at enterprise scale.

The LUMA acquisition establishes category leadership for MURAL as the company launches its blueprint for a Collaborative Intelligence System, a new approach that connects teams to unlock their genius, taking insights and ideas from possibility to reality. MURAL’s Collaborative Intelligence System will aim to solve the prevailing sense of disconnection felt by teams globally and address the $542 billion cost of inefficient team collaboration.

“Bad meetings, lost ideas, and frustrated teams are all symptoms of disconnection. These problems come from leaving collaboration to chance,” said Mariano Suarez-Battan, co-founder and CEO of MURAL. “LUMA has pioneered a different way to collaborate for over a decade, helping enterprise teams around the world innovate and do their best work together. As a part of MURAL, LUMA will help advance collaboration design, a new discipline that will level up how people work together. This acquisition is the first public step in our mission to support collaborative intelligence for the new hybrid workplace.”

LUMA created the LUMA System, a fundamental collection of design methods that Harvard Business Review called a “taxonomy of innovation.” The LUMA System provides a common language for collaboration and has been used by teams working at more than 3,000 organizations worldwide. Building on years of partnership between the two companies, the LUMA team will support MURAL’s deployment of the Collaboration Design Institute in late 2022, where the discipline of collaboration design will be taught and learned through self-service curriculum, cohort-based learning, certifications, and communities. 

Collaboration design helps people connect and innovate together — building on a legacy of design thinking methods and facilitation expertise to move teams from ideas to action. Cultivating visual thinkers, developing relational intelligence, and creating psychological safety are critical elements of collaboration design. MURAL expects more than 250 million knowledge workers must develop collaboration design skills by 2025.

“As a company founded to help organizations innovate by transforming the way people work together, we’ve always been inspired by MURAL’s mission to transform enterprise collaboration,” said Chris Pacione, co-founder and CEO of LUMA. “This is the perfect opportunity for us to bring our pioneering approach to design and collaboration to the masses, and accelerate the formation and expansion of MURAL’s Collaboration Design Institute.”

The Collaborative Intelligence System

The Collaborative Intelligence System™ connects teams to unlock their potential and increase the innovation capacity of enterprises, creating a culture of effective collaboration where everyone is connected, contributing, and empowered to deliver business-driving outcomes.

The Collaborative Intelligence System has three central components: the Collaboration Design Institute, Collaboration Spaces, and Collaboration Insights. 

1. The Collaboration Design Institute™(CDI) will support and advance the new discipline of collaboration design. Collaboration designers work to inspire teams to connect and innovate, bringing purpose and intention to the collaboration process and fostering relational intelligence and psychological safety. Coming in late 2022, the CDI™ will offer training, curriculum development, certification, research, and consultation for professional collaboration designers. Furthermore, the CDI will support those who seek to level up teamwork with collaboration design know-how. MURAL’s acquisition of LUMA Institute is a pivotal first step in the development of the CDI. 
2. Collaboration Spaces make up the center of the Collaborative Intelligence System, empowering the practice of collaboration design for synchronous and asynchronous workflows, in-person and in-room collaborations, and more. The collaboration space is called a mural, an award-winning, interactive visual thinking canvas. Collaboration spaces are enhanced with powerful facilitation features, guided methods, and advanced collaboration capabilities and drive participation and engagement in meetings and workshops. The MURAL app is fully integrated with enterprise tech stack tools such as Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex by Cisco, Slack, and Jira — with many more integrations being developed and an API for building custom solutions, ensuring teams can move ideas and solutions into existing processes and workflows. 
3. Emerging Collaboration Insights™ features will offer actionable information so that leaders may empower teams and improve how work gets done together. Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of sources, responsibly and with respect for privacy, organizations will be able to measure and improve collaboration at every level of the organization, from individual teams to the entire enterprise.  

MURAL’s Collaborative Intelligence System offers teams and organizations an ever-growing toolkit of workflows and guided methods. These structured activities encourage both relational intelligence and problem solving while reducing bias and improving diversity of ideas. In addition, MURAL's thriving community of members and collaboration designers go beyond custom, on-demand service offerings to uplift and empower teamwork by sharing best practices, inspiration, and success stories. Finally, MURAL’s Collaborative Intelligence System is enterprise-grade, meeting the most stringent of IT and regulatory requirements. 

Analyst Endorsements

• "Collaboration is not technology; it is what people do together to reach common goals," according to Wayne Kurtzman, IDC Research Director for Collaboration and Communities. "The right technology enables collaboration to scale. Increasingly, people are opting for more visual ways of engaging. The hyper-evolving business landscape calls for greater creativity, inclusion, problem-solving and collaboration. The LUMA acquisition is a statement from MURAL that they both understand the complexities ahead and will be ready to help businesses meet those challenges."
• "The acquisition of LUMA shows rare insight in the world of digital collaboration, in that most orgs adopt collaboration with very little design in the process, leaving much of the human potential of the resulting interactions untapped” said Dion Hinchcliffe, VP and Principal Analyst, Constellation Research. “MURAL's acquisition of LUMA will allow its platform to be embedded much more deeply and meaningfully into its customers' most strategic activities."

Customer Endorsements

Though it was only introduced recently, MURAL is already supporting practices of collaboration design at companies like Autodesk, SAP, IBM, and Intuit.

• “It will never be enough to bring the brightest minds together and hope for the best. By capturing ideas and measuring teamwork, collaborative intelligence helps us go from start to finish and collaborate with confidence.” – Nico Valencia, Head of Innovation, Corporate Responsibility, Intuit
• “Human-centered design (HCD) methods are ‘power tools’ for anyone facilitating complex discussions to get to an outcome. In addition to the methods, we all need a digital platform to support working in this way, and it's even more important now in a ‘remote-first’ or ‘hybrid’ world. MURAL brings all this together with collaborative intelligence.” – Rob Dickins, Chief of Staff, Autodesk

ABOUT MURAL

MURAL is a collaborative intelligence company. We connect teams to unlock their potential, increasing the innovation capacity of the enterprise. MURAL creates a culture of effective collaboration — where everyone is connected, contributing, and empowered to deliver business-driving outcomes. Try MURAL for free www.mural.co.

MURAL is a registered trademark of Tactivos, Inc.

ABOUT LUMA INSTITUTE

LUMA Institute® is a recognized global leader that equips people to be collaborative problem solvers through its acclaimed learning experiences, digital resources, and certification programs. Founded in 2010, LUMA transforms how teams collaborate and innovate at enterprise scale. The LUMA Principle guides the company’s work by inviting people to Look carefully, Understand deeply, Make resourcefully, and Adapt accordingly. Organizations around the world rely on the LUMA System of Innovation, a modular and adaptive collection of design methods. LUMA has reached people in more than 140 countries on six continents through private innovation programs for enterprise clients, public workshops that are open to all, and a digital platform called LUMA Workplace®. Join us and let’s Make Things Better®.