[jonwithoutanh]

Why not hang out in a video call and hash ideas out on your individual whiteboards? I've done it this way for over a decade and it's been fine for "breaking new ground".

The most productive person I've ever worked with, who was responsible for the biggest initiatives at a previous company worked solo in Hong Kong while the rest of the team was in North America. Never presented an issue. He came up with many innovative ideas in NLP and other ML techniques (not my area). All of his collaboration was over video calls, was never an issue.

Perhaps you are not being inclusive of your remote workers in your brainstorming sessions?