policy & reform
campusreview.com.au
Sharing is trending
Should more universities
embrace co-working spaces?
By Fang Zhao
C
o-working spaces are shared workspaces, and have become
a striking and very visible feature of metropolitan areas. They
have proliferated and are growing fast around the globe,
embraced not only by remote workers, startup employees and
freelancers, but also by larger companies.
The latest figures show that there are 14,411 co-working spaces
in the world today. The number is estimated to rise to 3.8 million by
2020 and 5.1 million by 2022 (Amador, 2018).
In Australia, co-working spaces grew by 297 per cent to 309
between 2013 and 2017. The recent forecast estimates a triple growth
in co-working spaces by 2030 (Cheung, 2018).
According to the market report of Office Hub, which runs one of
the largest co-working space leasing platforms in Australia, demand
from larger businesses for co-working spaces doubled between
2017 and 2018. This signals that larger companies are increasingly
transitioning to co-working spaces.
KEY DRIVERS
Empirical evidence shows that the popularity of this new way of
working is largely attributed to a sense of belonging to a community,
work flexibility, serendipitous encounters with like-minded people,
idea generation and sharing, business networking, and a relief from
the loneliness of working from home (e.g. Mariott et al, 2017).
It is interesting to see that many startups and some large
companies in Australia such as Woolworths, Accenture and LG
have embraced the co-working space concept (Office Hub, 2018)
because of the collaborative working environment that co-working
spaces provide and the cost-effectiveness in terms of flexible
leasing terms.
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OUR RESEARCH
To develop an in-depth understanding of the popular trend of
co-working, we, a research team at Edith Cowan University,
started our co-working space research project about two years
ago. We studied a sample of 30 co-working spaces around
Australia, of which 13 are owned by universities.
We visited and interviewed 15 operators and 30 users of the co-
working spaces. In addition, some of our team members spent a
number of days working in some of the co-working spaces to get
first-hand experience. Our sample is representative in terms of size,
industry sector and location.
KEY FINDINGS
According to our research, currently 11 out of 38 Australian
universities are running co-working spaces. With the Queensland
University of Technology and University of Western Australia having
two each, the total number of co-working spaces run by Australian
universities is 13, which constitutes 4.2 per cent of co-working spaces
in Australia. Some of them are located on-campus, such as the
Australian Catholic University’s Collaborate Plus, and others are co-
located with business incubators and accelerators outside campuses,
such as Edith Cowan University’s Business & Innovation Centre.
Australian university co-working spaces follow the same business
model as their non-university counterparts, except for the fees
charged for members. They generally have a lower fee structure
than non-university co-working spaces, and some of them even
offer free memberships, but most accept only members who are
associated with the universities.
In terms of the purpose and motivation of running and using
co-working spaces, we find some interesting similarities and
some striking differences between university and non-university
spaces. For example, all the co-working spaces we studied had the
same agenda: to establish a community in which members could
create and share new ideas, and collaborate and interact with each
other, in the hope that it might lead to innovation. This is one of the
most important reasons for many startup founders and workers
joining co-working spaces.
For university co-working spaces, our research found that
bringing entrepreneurs and startup workers to campuses to