The benefits probably depend a lot on the size of the company... many of these ‘serendipitous’ conversations I have had were in fact network effects, but technological - I accidentally found out about someone else’s skunkworks project we found useful, or some new piece of technology developed just a row or two over we never knew about.
I would imagine the is less true in small companies, some because of the size, but also because of the homogeneity of focus - you have to have a different environment, a different work biome for the output to diverge enough to take advantage of this.