co.working

For those unfamiliar with the concept, co-working is about bringing businesses together into a shared work environment. It’s like a collective of people coming from different fields who choose to share the same work space. It ranges from people working together in someone’s living room, to dedicated co-working spaces with dozens or even hundreds of businesses all under one roof.

Besides having the advantages of an office space without having to shoulder the cost themselves, this idea kind of brings crowd sourcing and social networks to the offline world. The interaction ranges between just physically sharing the space to common brainstorming sessions and replacing suppliers with the members of the community.

Living in Berlin now and having the honor to interview some of the best innovation managers in the world, it’s become even more clear to me that we are dealing with an important shift. From online to offline – yes, even if it doesn’ t look like, somehow the number of offline experiences is slowly increasing in terms of value. And more importantly a turn towards open innovation is taking place. This not only means giving power to the consumers and asking them what they think the product should be like but mostly approaching the ideation process from various, even extreme environments that at first glance have nothing to do with the researched topic. This is why I think co-working and being surrounded also by people who don’t belong to your field brings the best insights and is the best thing that could happen to your business.

And what if the next step will be the death of competition and sharing knowledge will make the world a better place? Till then you can read here the pragmatic view on co-working, via mashable: Ultimately, I feel the future of co-working lies in an organic, adaptable business ecosystem. Instead of an accounting department, you have fifteen accounting businesses with varying specialties. The same goes for marketing, legal, and any other specialty a business could need. When you begin combining the resources of large corporations with the flexibility and speed of start-ups, the possibilities are astounding.

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