Campus Review Vol 29. Issue 7 July 2019 | Page 16

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. 14 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