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The rise of communal workspaces

When co-working began to take off in Cape Town and Johannesburg roughly four years ago, the major commercial property players did a very good job of projecting disinterest. As the spokesperson for a big multinational commercial property enterprise told this author last year: “We can’t really identify the business in it. We offer it, but compared to core business it’s a drop in the ocean.” 

But by now it has become clear that some of the major landlords are indeed interested. OPEN, which operates co-working spaces in Johannesburg and in Cape Town’s V&A Waterfront, is in the final stage of forging a partnership with a major property company. The deal will see co-working hubs established in multiple areas, totalling some 20?000m2 of space. At the corporate end of the serviced office space spectrum, Redefine Properties announced a partnership with global flexible workspace company Regus in mid-September. This will see Redefine offering 4?500m2 of “competitive and flexible workspace solutions” across seven sites in Johannesburg and Cape Town. 

These are not big deals – toes in the water, at most – but they could very well be the harbingers of a significant change. Paul Keursten (co-founder of OPEN), certainly thinks so. “I think the co-working revolution is stirring and will only grow from here.”

Total re-imagining required

“Data, software and the uptake of smart devices have fundamentally changed the ways in which we work, but the spaces in which we work haven’t adapted. Everywhere you look offices are being renovated, but this generally means little more than a facelift and the introduction of a coffee bar. What is required – what is inevitable, I would argue – is a total re-imagining of workspace.”

Keursten’s views are in line with the World Economic Forum’s January 2016 The Future of Jobs report, which has 44% of all respondents (amongst them the biggest employers in the world) naming “changing work environments and flexible working arrangements” as the “major driver of change” in their sectors.

The report asserts that “application of technology has already changed when and where work is done in practically every industry, as workplaces of the industrial age give way to work practices of the digital age, including remote work, flexible work and on-demand work. Organisations are likely to have an ever-smaller pool of core full-time employees for fixed functions, backed up by colleagues in other countries and external consultants and contractors for specific projects.”

Ian Merrington, CEO of the Cape Innovation and Technology Initiative (CiTi), which offers co-working opportunities via an initiative called The Barn Woodstock, said that while he believed “co-working is going to be massive”, it was important to distinguish between divergent strategies within the co-working movement. “Co-working as most know it is actually quite bland,” he says.

“You have space, chairs, fast internet and good coffee. It’s just a real estate play, really, and while I believe there will be room for all players within the co-working phenomenon, those who are merely in the business of providing co-working space will settle somewhere near the bottom. Bandwidth doesn’t set anyone apart anymore. The initiatives that will drive the co-working movement, I think, will offer much more in the way of value-added services,” he says.

CiTi, founded in 1998 with the aim of developing “Cape Town and the region as a global technology cluster and a vibrant hub for innovation”, is putting its energy into the establishment of sector-specific hubs for business incubators, accelerators and start-ups, the basic idea being that similarly-able minds can’t help but feed off each other, and that the right mix of energy and ability in the right environment is what creates future-defining ideas and technologies.

The strategy grew out of CiTi’s own experience of seeing one of its initiatives, The Bandwidth Barn (now The Barn Woodstock), become the continent’s major hub for fintech incubators and start-ups.

“Look at any sector – banking, legal, medicine, education – and you find business leaders looking terribly short of sleep because they’ve been fretting about the pace of technological change,” says Merrington.

“They know they’re finished without software, and they’re equally aware that developing these tools in-house is fantastically complex and expensive. So they’re looking for outside help, increasingly, and this has created unprecedented opportunity for tech start-ups,” he says. He adds that the extraordinary pace of technological change had given rise to “liberal new attitudes towards the sharing of intellectual property, which many above a certain age find quite alien”.

“The banks fell behind because they grew these secretive, isolationist cultures,” he explained.

“Tech start-ups, by contrast, look to situate themselves within mutually supportive ecologies, knowing that collaboration unlocks creativity. We seek to meet these needs by pulling the best and the brightest per sector into synergistic hubs, where the real value addition lies in the access to brilliant minds and complimentary skill sets,” he said.

OPEN is also in the business of growing collaborative communities, but where CiTi focuses on creating niche hubs, OPEN believes in the power of diversity.

“We cater for a variety of incubators, accelerators, companies, start-ups and individuals, by offering a mix of dedicated workspace, eventing facilities, co-working areas and labs. We treat everyone the same, whether you’re a student or a CEO,” he says.

“A big inspiration for us is the work of Steven Johnson, author of the book Where Good Ideas Come From. He begins with the example of the coral reef, and explains that so much life flourishes in these spaces because the coral reef is a non-judgmental system in which a variety of species live in close proximity. It’s a fertile ground of equal opportunity, and we take that as a metaphor. What the coral reef is to sea life we want to be for human ideas and innovation.” He adds that he and his partners invest a great deal of energy into maximising, through virtual and physical design, the possibilities for interaction between OPEN members.

“Therein lies the major value-addition: the opportunity to meet and interact with interesting people in a high-trust environment,” he says.

This is a shortened version of an article that originally appeared in the 27 October edition of finweek. Buy and download the magazine here

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