Coworking as a big opportunity in the future

Coworking as a big opportunity in the future

Development centre Novo mesto for the last 2 years participated in project INOCME. The INCOME project stands for INnovating COworking Methods through Exchange. It focused on the co-working approach as a way to respond to the challenges of youth unemployment, taking entrepreneurship and cultural infrastructure as a potential path out of unemployment, especially attractive for young people, tending to be more creative, dynamic and giving preference to self-employment.

At the end of February 2019 project ended, on the link you can find the final publication of the project. Publication represents an useful map:

• of types and concepts of coworking,
• the Building Blocks of Co-Working
• unemployment statistic at youth,
• possibilities and
• numerus cases of good practices that were gathered during the job shadow experiences of project partners.

What we learned or how we grew from space for low office rental to a space that connects people, enables growth of business and gives push for real entrepreneurial mindset?

Development centre Novo mesto is running Business incubator Podbreznik. On daily basis we work with young entrepreneurs through mentoring them within variety of our programmes. Our coworking space exists since 2014 and first it was only a good opportunity for young entrepreneurs to come to their office space for low price. 4 years of experience, exchange of good practices and hard work showed us, that coworking can be so much more but just cheap office space. Co-workers are not sharing only space and occasional jokes to brighten up the mood, but also knowledge, experiences, connections and therefore the whole coworking space is growing.

If we put it simple, we could say that coworking is any kind of way of long-term cooperation between different stakeholders. We can see that sometimes for coworking physical space is not even necessary. We have communications through internet – virtual spaces, platforms where partners from different parts of the world cooperate together – share their knowledge, experiences, ideas around some projects, issues etc. Can we say this are virtual coworking spaces? We believe so.

On the other hand, we still think that old-fashioned office talk in coworking helps co-workers to establish long-term strong cooperation and even some joints ventures between them.

First INCOME conference in Stockholm opened our mind about including different profiles in coworking, such as artist, designers etc. Different profiles can enable totally new connections and opportunities.

Later in project INCOME we experienced job shadowing activities, which gave us a confirmation that our plans of establishing FabLAb in our incubator, can be a right way of development. Why? In Italy we visited some FabLabs as examples of good practices. We learned that FabLab is a coworking space were people with different knowledge work with specialized tools (3d printers, laser cutters, robots…) and make physical products, prototypes. For us establishing FabLAb is now important focus and with this new kind of coworking we will also attract new groups of youth (designers, engineers, artisans…) and connect them in new projects and opportunities.

Project INCOME opened our minds and helped us to get the information that are key for development of our Business incubator Podbreznik in the future and our coworking concept. We believe that there is no wrong path, as long as there is vision and knowledge in one place – connecting people. COWORKING is A BIG OPPROTUNITY.

Read more on link.

Impressions from the event: