Why Universities Should Create Coworking Hubs

Colleges and universities want to experiment with more flexible and collaborative workplaces but have no “lab” in which they can try out new concepts and expose faculty and staff to new ways of working. To prioritize space at the heart of campus for students and faculty, staff groups are moving off-campus and are left with no place to be productive before or after a meeting that brings them to campus.

Institutions are welcoming industry partners to conference centers, innovation labs, and incubators, but there’s often no flexible place for these visitors to work for an hour or a month. The higher education workforce is changing with more part-time and adjunct faculty, more professional staff, and less clerical staff but university workspace is inflexible and inefficient.

Coworking is a solution to all these problems and more. Coworking spaces are shared office environments that combine the flexibility of short-term leases with the community that comes from common spaces and the programs and services that activate them. They are becoming increasingly popular in the corporate world – the number of flexible coworking spaces has risen from 75 in 2007 to 13,800 in 2017.

Now is the time for universities to adopt coworking models on their campuses so that institutions can be more innovative, porous, collaborative, flexible, and efficient.

In this white paper, you will learn:

• Trends changing the university workplace
• Potential benefits of coworking spaces to meet these challenges
• Examples of institutions experimenting with new work environments
• Five critical steps to implement coworking on campuses

Fill out the form below to learn about why and how to create a coworking space on your campus.