Coworking Spaces

Within recent years an increasing amount of knowledge workers that are (mostly) active in the field of the creative industries and new media have been starting to make use of shared urban office environments known as coworking spaces. While essentially these coworking spaces can simply be conceived of as places where urban knowledge workers can rent a desk and work alongside each other, these environments are increasingly being associated with high expectations concerning the future of knowledge work as they intend to foster interactive dynamics among individual and local communities of entrepreneurs, freelancers and startups that make use of these spaces. The local concentration of these knowledge workers within coworking spaces has in particularly been suggested to be beneficial for knowledge creation, which involves the process by which new ideas, products and services are being developed, given that coworking spaces facilitate the physical platforms for these knowledge workers to identify new opportunities through networking practices, which consequently could lead to knowledge creation through the combination of the skills and talents of these coworkers. As a result of these assumed benefits for knowledge creation, coworking spaces have been conceptualized as microclusters in analogy to clusters which can be understood as “geographic concentrations of interconnected companies, specialized suppliers, service providers, firms from related industries, and associated institutions”, and which facilitate similar knowledge dynamics albeit on a different scale. Evidence of such dynamics however appeared to be lacking, which is why scholars started to cast their doubts on whether coworking spaces can actually redeem their promise of becoming promising platforms for knowledge creation. Moreover, despite that previous studies provided some useful indications of factors that could provoke knowledge creation dynamics among coworkers, none of these studies qualitatively assessed which of these factors are actually considered effective by the main actors related to coworking spaces. In order to address this gap in the literature, a qualitative inquiry by the means of eleven in-depth interviews was conducted with both coworkers and staff related to the management of seven Amsterdam-based coworking spaces, in order to find an answer to the following research question: “How can coworking spaces effectively foster knowledge creation?” Cluster theory was first consulted in order to assess whether similar factors are of influence on knowledge creation dynamics within coworking spaces as the conceptualization of these environments as microclusters seems to suggest. The results of the thematic data analysis indicated four main factors that were considered as effective in their ability to foster knowledge creation dynamics within coworking spaces: Selection, Connecting, Interactive Design and Educating. The relevance of these factors however seemed to differ between coworking spaces that were either larger, or smaller in terms of size and populations. Consequently, these differences make it questionable whether the microcluster conceptualization of coworking spaces will remain sustainable as it only seems to cover one particular configuration of coworking.