Coworking Industry

 Explore our coworking solutions.

The OpenWork Turnkey Coworking Development Model streamlines processes and maximizes effective rollouts. This is a scalable and repeatable process for all types of workplaces. Explore our coworking development components.

Multifamily residential communities, especially those located within thoughtfully designed mixed-use projects, are becoming important locations and potential revenue sources in what is a new phase of urban planning and development.

In this white paper we look at the challenges that the coworking industry faces in light of the current crisis, and provide three scenarios that explore what might unfold in the coming years. Each of the three scenarios will require adaptation and innovation among coworking operators, some more than others.

Anyone can start a coworking space. If planned effectively, it’s possible to secure financial backing from lending institutions or local angel investors. As the world’s first coworking consultancy (serving coworking startups since 2014 and players in the industry since 2008), we’ve received inquiries from a wide spectrum of types who have entertained the notion of…

What’s in a word? Or a phrase? Over the past thirty years companies of all stripes and sizes have embraced the concept of activity based working (ABW). ABW is a workplace strategy where employees do not have a fixed office or workstation, but rather work in different areas of an office depending on the type…

OpenWork Founding Partner, Andrew Jones, recently published a guest article in Today’s Hotelier. The article, discussing the growing trend of Hotel Coworking, opens the door to the opportunity of embracing the coworking model within the existing hospitality industry ecosystem. Read the article, Your (Meeting) Room is Now Ready.

Over the past five years we at the OpenWork Agency have helped real estate developers and entrepreneurs around the world with their various “coworking” projects. I use quotes here because for anyone familiar with the original coworking 1.0 movement, these projects are typically much less ‘coworking’ and much more ‘office.’ That is, the very notion of coworking…

Coworking Grows Up In a little over a decade coworking has grown from being a scrappy officing solution for freelancers and startups into a multibillion dollar industry with thousands of operators around the world.[1] Defined as ‘a multi-company campus for companies of all sizes,’ coworking has established itself as a viable workplace arrangement for the sharing economy. Industry unicorn,…

Over the past decade  more and more companies- small, medium, and large- have embraced coworking as part of their workplace strategy. It is now widely accepted that coworking is no longer just for freelancers, startups, and solopreneurs. When firms such as IBM, Amazon, and UBS take up whole buildings under WeWork’s coworking management system, it…

As I have suggested recently, the key drivers behind the growth of corporate coworking have been for the most part real estate drivers. The economics of this simply make sense, despite the skeptics. If one looks only narrowly at the price per square foot for a workstation in a private office in a coworking space (such…

Twenty five percent of WeWork’s members are ‘corporate coworkers,’ and the company now boasts that 22% of the Fortune 500 companies have employees who work in their spaces. At the current rate of growth, some 40-50% of coworking members will be corporate users within five to seven years. With firms such as GE, Samsung, Microsoft, Dell, HSBC, Accenture,…

As part of being in the coworking industry since its inception, operating coworking spaces, consulting with coworking operators and real estate developers, participating in (and running) global coworking and workspace conferences, it’s our job at OpenWork to stay-in-the-know regarding innovations (and disruptions) in our industry. We share a lot on social media about coworking, the…

In my current book project (tentatively called “After Corporate Culture”), I am trying to understand the long-term impact that fluid and mobile working is having on company culture. For quite some time, of course, many firms have allowed, either officially or unofficially, employees to work from home or off-site at least some of the time. However, as…

As long-standing participants in the coworking industry, the partners at OpenWork Agency have seen the industry evolve since the beginning. What was once a social movement is now a sure enough industry. Depending on what your vantage point is, though, coworking is different things to different people. In this article I reflect on some of…

Marc Andreessen once famously said that ‘software is eating the world,’ and that if your business can’t be boiled down to a simple (software) solution it probably doesn’t have much of a chance. Or at least, in his world of venture investing, if your startup isn’t predicated on an elegant piece of software, then your…

It was recently announced that WeWork, the global coworking chain, has signed a deal to manage an entire office building for IBM in Manhattan. Up to 800 employees will work in the building, which WeWork will manage as a single shared office environment.  At first glance this looks like it is just an extension of…

Bloomberg BusinessWeek “Coworking Spaces are Going Corporate” By Patrick Clark, 2/19/2016 Corporate Coworking Program:

Crain’s Chicago Business “The Incredible Shrinking HQ” by Claire Bushey, 1/30/2016