Institute For The Future

Spaces of Lightweight Innovation: What Can Companies Learn From Coworking?

Last night, I had the opportunity to participate in an informal workshop on "What Can Companies Learn From Coworking?" held at New Work City, one of the biggest and oldest coworking spaces in Manhattan. The workshop was organized by Shift, a workplace consultancy loosely based out of Austin, Texas but with team members around the world. Shift is led by Drew Jones, one of the authors of the first book on coworking, published last year, titled "I'm Outta Here".

 

Having spent much of the last 3 years researching, writing and prototyping forecasts about the future of work, I believe that this is a really important question to be asking, especially at a time when financial constraints are forcing companies to make some very hasty decisions about their workforce, workplace, and collaborative technology platforms.

 

For instance, consider that a lot of companies are simultaneously cutting back on real estate and travel while investing gobs of money in high-definition videoconferencing. These companies are essentially taking a very dated notion of telework and throwing massive computing and network capacity at it, rather than rethinking the complex ways in which workers manage physical and virtual co-presence to get work done.

 

In that sense I think that coworking offers a really interesting middle ground between the cubicle farm and the completely distributed workforce - it creates new nodes of activity to which home-based and mobile workers can gravitate. And, it has the added benefit of exposing those workers to people from different organizations, with different ideas and skills. Coworking may just be the architecture of open innovation, literally.

 

What we spent a lot of time discussing and didn't really resolve was what kinds of corporate workers and teams might be the first successful migrants to coworking spaces. The people in the room with experience managing coworking spaces noted that while a few remote workers from larger companies are starting to nest there, there hasn't really been much direct engagement. The corporate innovation strategists (raise my hand) will no doubt be sniffing around soon, and workplace designers have definitely taken interest, but its not clear what kind of real production teams might find coworking a valuable enough proposition to take the substantial (perceived) risk setting up at an open coworking spot entails.

 

I expect that as coworking spaces mature, and the best and brightest of their members decide to stay on even as they become more professionally successful - instead of leaving for their own private digs - they will be the magnets that draw corporate clients and collaborators into coworking spaces. At first, it may be temporary, project-based corporate tenants coming in for intense teamwork with their coworking-based contractors. And as they discover the richness of the community and the ability to quickly spin up new projects in the open, collaborative atmosphere of coworking spaces, a light will go on, and we'll see some of that coworking DNA get absorbed back into the corporate organism.

 

I think the answer to Drew Jones' question "what can companies learn from coworking?" is "A lot." If you're reading this, and work for a big company, I encourage you to try out a coworking space on your next trip. It's available in every major city on the planet (and many smaller ones too), cheaper than an Internet cafe, you'll meet great people, and you'll get a glimpse of the future of work.