While it depends on your definition of industry, based on our definition there are a lot of industry specific coworking facilities. In SF area alone examples include The Hub (social entrepreneurs), Writers Grotto (writers and media), Mission*Social (social entrepreneurs), Biocurious (biosciences) and many others.
Also, many of the coworking spaces in the SF area are effectively tech industry spaces. It's just the nature of the bay area. And obviously, there are many vertical spaces elsewhere in the US and world. The rapid growth of collaborative kitchens across the US is another example. We see these spaces as industry mini-clusters. Industrial clusters are groups of similar or related firms in a defined geographic area that share common markets, technologies and worker skill needs, and which are often linked by buyer-seller relationships. Firms and workers in industry clusters benefit from the advantages that a shared base of sophisticated, industry specific knowledge brings. Silicon Valley in technology, New York in financial services and Detroit in automobiles are famous examples of large clusters. But small industrial clusters are also common. We think many of the vertically oriented coworking spaces exhibit many of the same benefits as industrial clusters. We've done a lot of work looking at coworking spaces that serve social entrepreneurs (we're hoping to get a paper out on this soon). We've found that social entrepreneurs in spaces catering to social firms collaborate more and report higher levels of business networking than social entrepreneurs that are members of other types of coworking spaces. We think this is due to the cluster effect. Having said that, we agree with Alex that diversity of skills, backgrounds, views and opinions are important. Clusters achieve this by having a mix of participants from across the industry supply and demand chains. Large clusters also benefit from the diverse nature of most broad industries. Coworking facilities achieve this by having people from different professions (designers, programmers, lawyers, etc.) and different skill sets. This brings strong weak tie benefits (yet another paper we're trying to finish). But we also think vertical coworking spaces could, at least in some cases, add additional value by bringing together people that are diverse by profession/skill set, but serve the same broad industry. Obviously, little work has been done on this topic. A lot more needs to be done before drawing strong conclusions. Steve On Mar 16, 1:11 pm, OC Houston <[email protected]> wrote: > Does anyone have an industry specific coworking space? Or, does that > defeat the purpose of the concept? > > Toni -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/coworking?hl=en.
