What should a collaboration space be?

I went to last night’s Geekdinner with Moo, which was pretty interesting. My friend Mitch and his wife were there. I was enthusing about my recent thinking about startup environments especially after reading Paul Graham’s short essay on Cities.

Mitch is a great person to bounce stuff off, especially if it has some relevance to innovation. We had some great brainstorming about what is useful or necessary for a vibrant startup community. We really like the idea of collaboration spaces, and there are a number of places where you can rent a desk. What I dislike about such place is it’s still office space rental, even on a micro-economic scale. It’s good that freelancers can get out of their houses because you can go a little mad never seeing anyone during the day.

Mitch was telling me about his club the Institute of Directors which provides some desk space for its members. He pays a yearly fee to be a member and one of the perks is the space in central London to work from. I really like this idea, almost treating a collaboration space like a gym. It would be easy enough to have an online status of the amount of empty desks available at every location.

This idea in itself is pretty cool, but I still don’t think it’s enough to begin to provide that environment for collaboration where startups are citizen number one. As cliché as it is I still think that a cyber café is essential. Not everyone can base themselves in temporary desk space, and startups need to meet corporate shills (like me) as much as we need to meet them. Startups can learn a lot from the deep technology understand a lot of people working in corporations have, in return startups often have a firmer grasp of innovation and cultural hygiene.

Now I am of course just gassing right now, I have no idea if this is a viable business, but I think it certainly is something government should look at funding. The more collaboration space that encourage new and existing business to talk to each other the more vibrant our communities will become.

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