Coworking Is Better for You Than Previously Thought

We've covered the benefits of coworking— a new European survey shows that the concept might be better for you than previously thought.

For example, 93% and 86% of people say their personal and business circles have grown, respectively, and 76% say they're more productive. More importantly, 88% said their isolation has decreased, which probably influences their productivity (and happiness). A good chunk of people even trusted these strangers enough to leave their stuff there unattended, because 96% of them thought community was an important value among coworkers.

As to why they chose to stick with that coworking spot, 81% said they liked the people, 61% said it was the location and 46% said it was the price. And surprisingly enough, the average worker rated their coworking space a 8.4 out of 10.

Keep in mind that the magazine Deskmag only talked to 1500 people for this non-scientific survey, so the results are probably skewed a bit. Nevertheless, these are pretty high figures pointing to a nice benefit for working together rather than alone. Here's a directory to help find a coworking center near you.



"Coworking signals a socialized and economic shift in how people do work. Co-working doubled in 2010 to over 650 locations worldwide! The concept of “coworking” is a burgeoning business model that serves the needs of an increasingly nomadic work force, giving them a consistent work place and a social outlet."

Shared work space gaining popularity

By Mike Cassidy

San Jose Mercury News

In the next Silicon Valley boom — and let's hope to God there is a next valley boom — the story is not going to be one of improbable startups that launched in someone's garage. Instead, the story is going to be of improbable startups that launched in some semichaotic communal work space where free agents toiled side by side with other free agents they didn't know from Adam.

It's been a growing trend for some time, this practice called "co-working" — where contractors, consultants, bloggers and others of the self-employed tribe rent desk space, private workstations or small offices in a common space complete with Wi-Fi, copiers, coffee and the other accouterments of office life. There are serious economic and technological reasons driving the arrangement, but the most important thing about it may be what it says about us.

It turns out that no matter the marvels of mobile phones, the fabulousness of Facebook or the wonders of the webinar, many human beings need to be around other human beings to feel truly productive. We need each other for ideas, encouragement, conversation and the occasional good-natured razzing. It's why we work. OK, money is why we work. But it's why we can enjoy coming to work.

"You get isolated spending day after day by yourself," says Brad Cammon, who spent months working from home on Jamgrams, his electronic greeting-card startup. "You really start to lose it."

Remember when working from home was the thing? We were freed from the bonds of our office cubicles by advances in computing, telephony and networking. Now there is something of a backlash, resulting in places like NextSpace, the 3-month-old downtown San Jose, Calif., co-working center where Cammon has relocated much of his work life.

He is among those who have crawled out of their home offices in search of better working conditions. Some tried Starbucks as an alternative and found it lacking. They now "want to have someone to say 'hi' to in the morning, and not just the barista," says Gretchen Knight Baisa, who manages NextSpace's San Jose location, the fourth the company has opened in California.

Co-working, which appears to have started on the West Coast, has spread nationwide in recent years. While growth statistics are hard to come by, you can look at NextSpace's experience as an indicator. The company has opened four locations in three years, while landing about $630,000 in angel investment, says NextSpace CEO Jeremy Neuner.

It stands to reason that the practice would be increasing, says Santa Clara University management professor Terri Griffith, at a time when traditional jobs are disappearing and workers are becoming far more comfortable with the technology required to build an untethered workforce.

You'll find some of these workers on the first floor of the historic Lion Building at Second and San Fernando streets in San Jose. About 40 members pay $175 to $2,500 a month to sit at tables and cubicles in an open room, or to occupy a few small offices along the walls.

And while they are focused on creating, launching, promoting, growing and succeeding at their own things, they find time for each other.

When a client of information-technology consultant Tina Burke needs some fill-in workers, Burke turns to Balance Professional & Technical Resources, a temporary staffing agency situated in the office across the room. When Todd Wilkinson's WordWatch, which helps small businesses with AdWord campaigns, needs Web hosting services, Burke, whose Ayuda Networks is a reseller for Rackspace, connects him with the cloud company.

"It's good for them. It's good for us," Burke says. "We're able to help one another out."

The move to common work spaces is all about connections — for commerce and companionship. There are happy hours at NextSpace complete with pomegranate martinis. There are brown-bag lunches and late-night runs to the taco truck. Walk around the NextSpace office and you'll hear stories of the importance of those connections.

"After one year of working at home, I had to get out," says Elastic Digital CEO Cameron Avery. "I had to save my marriage." OK, he's joking. But there is something about being surrounded by others who are working and focused on business and interested in your challenges and who might even have ideas about how to surmount them.

"I'd never get that sitting at home," says Avery, whose company creates digital tools to drive sales. "All I get is wonderful artwork from my 6-year-old, which is food for the soul." But it isn't something you can easily monetize.

Which is not to say that money is everything. It's just to say that pomegranate martinis aside, this is a workplace. And in the end, that's something many industrious worker need.





And the Bay Area - with about a half dozen co-working sites up and running - is one of the hotbeds of the movement. "We definitely have a stronger presence," said Steve King of Emergent Research in Lafayette, who studied co-working as part of a report on the future of small business. "We have a vibrant personal-business community in the Bay Area. And because it's very tech- and media-focused, it fits in well with the concepts of co-working. We're seeing a clear trend to free agents and personal businesses, due to outsourcing, layoffs, and people looking for work-life balance or more work flexibility," said King. "That's going to result in more people working on their own either full or part time. Those folks need support. And what's really cool about co-working is it solves that problem for a very modest amount of money."

Coworking is an emerging trend that redefines the 21st century working surroundings. It blends the best of both worlds: work from home yet enjoy the social workplace sense and the casual friendly coffee-shop environment.



by Bruce Nussbaum

Designers Are The New Drivers Of American Entrepreneurialism

I recently walked into a packed hall of 200 Parsons students for an event called “Start Something--Why Creatives Need to Become Entrepreneurs,” organized by the NYCreative Interns group. Four women entrepreneurs, including Laurel Touby, the founder of Mediabistro, were up front, talking about their experiences of launching their respective businesses. The incredible energy in the room highlighted an emerging trend--the headlong crash of creativity into capitalism to forge a startup model for the future. In this new model, designers drive the force of American entrepreneurialism.

This business model is a cause for true optimism. It’s not the big business capitalism that no longer generates jobs or income or tax revenues. Nor is it the old, slow attempts by design and design thinking to reform big corporations to make their culture more innovative, with limited success. Rather, it’s the capitalism of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic--the original, early form of entrepreneurial capitalism. It’s the promise of design fusing with startup culture to increase innovation by raising the success rate of venture capital from 10% to as high as 80%. This growing desire among designers to bring their user focus, strategic vision, iterative methodologies, and propositional thinking to the still-geeky, tech/engineering-centric world of startups promises to be transformative and explosive.

The pattern can be broken down into a series of dots. There’s the dot of students at Parsons, RISD, RCA, the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, and Aalto University, in Helsinki, beginning to embrace the world of startups. (Stanford has been there for a while, thanks to David Kelley.)

The emerging trend represents a headlong crash of creativity into capitalism.

There’s a dot of small design/innovation consultancies, such as Ammunition, Fuse, and Smart Design, which are developing and selling more of their own products, independently and through corporate partnerships. (Yves Béhar has been an entrepreneur for a decade; his latest product, a great new urban bike called Local, is now in production.) In addition, we have IDEO now supporting incubators such as General Assembly, Excelerate, and TechStars, and helping to launch products such as the Yoomi self-warming baby bottle.

Perhaps the most important dot of all is the one of innovative startups started by entrepreneurs with design degrees or backgrounds--YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare, Tumblr, Airbnb, Slideshare, Vimeo, and Feedburner, and YCombinator. These successful examples have inspired countless design students who want to start their own companies. They see that it can be done.

Another dot is Idiom, India’s answer to IDEO. The cutting-edge design/innovation consultancy has successfully launched 80 companies, out of 100 attempts, over the past six years, with the average launch taking about nine months from concept to profitability. (Idiom calls its process Mind to Market.) By applying the approaches and tools of design to the traditional startup process, Idiom increased the success rate of VC from 10% to 80%.

Led by its cofounder Sonia Manchanda, whom I consider to be the intellectual heir to the great C.K. Prahalad, Idiom is pioneering an entirely new VC model called Dream:In. I was lucky enough to participate in it last year. It goes like this: Hundreds of students were trained to interview and tape thousands of people about their dreams--their aspirations, not their needs. The dreams were collected, categorized, and presented to business people, consultants, and folks like me to help draw up business plans to enable those dreams. Those plans are now in a portfolio, from which venture capitalists can choose by category, by individual concept, or by investing in the fund itself. Each year, students go out, dreams come in, business plans replenish the portfolio. When was the last time we even thought about a radical change in the VC model? This made-in-India idea does.

What does this new direction of design toward entrepreneurship and away from big business mean? For me, two things. The less important is epistemological. The Parsons event by NYCreative Interns says it all--“Why Creatives Need to Become Entrepreneurs.” Creativity is a more inclusive term than design. Creativity is more easily accepted by venture capitalists, engineers, business people (and maybe even design students) than design. In addition, as design goes social, it moves toward industries such as advertising, with a long tradition of having “creatives” as part of its culture. In the past, I’ve said we should forget nomenclature--design, design thinking, innovation--it’s all a banana. Now that banana for me is creativity. But if anyone is uncomfortable with the term, just use the D-word.

The more important change from big business to new business is conceptual. We need new conceptual categories to deal with the new turn toward entrepreneurship. Zuckerberg, Hurley, Fake, Chase, Stone, Jobs--why and how and where they innovate require entirely different categories of design thinking, if you will, than we’ve used before. We need to learn much more about leadership and the roles of charisma and calling, and the transformation of inspiration into execution.

Entrepreneurs are a lot like religious prophets--they embody their following, they “know” their tacit dreams and longings, and they express them. It’s no accident that The Economist put Jobs on its cover with a halo around his head while he held the newly launched iPad as a “tablet.”

Another critical concept is framing. One key to entrepreneurs’ success is that they frame things differently, they connect existing dots in unique ways. The two guys who started Method, for example, frame-changed the market for sustainable cleaning products from a “suffering-is-good-for-you” space to a “cool-design-that’s-good-for-the-planet” space.

We also need to know a lot more about “meaning,” not just the data gathered by ethnography but knowledge that takes us much deeper into understanding culture. We need to know more about shared spectacle and why we crave it, and how honing craft and skill to near perfection can enable you to make and do the unique--which is what entrepreneurs do.

The encouraging news is that we are seeing a dynamic expansion of the scale, range, and power of traditional design. It promises to revive a broken VC model, capture the imagination and energy of a new generation of young designer/creators, and perhaps even regenerate Western capitalism (yes, no small thing). But perhaps most important of all, the creative turn to the entrepreneurial is hopeful. Optimism has always been at the heart of design. This takes it to a new level.



In 2008, one person businesses shot up 8%. 18% of information workers in the U.S. work from home every day. An additional 37% telecommute from their home offices at least one day per week. Combined, this means over half of the country’s business people are conducting important business within the comfort of their homes, cafes or other public places.  Though, these places can be distracting, isolating or lack the amenities, personal interaction and the tools needed for conducting day-to-day business.