Emergent Research (that's us) is teaming up with the Society for New Communications Research for a research project on coworking. We will be reporting on the project and coworking in general on our new CoworkingLabs project blog.
We've been following the trends towards coworking and work "third places" for some time. We first wrote about coworking in a research report in the Intuit Future of Small Business report The Changing Face of Entrepreneurship, which was released in January of 2007.
Based on the growth of freelancers and the self-employed, the shift to mobile and distributed work and the increasing numbers of coworking facilities, we believe coworking may be at a tipping point. Because of this, we think this is an excellent time to explore coworking in more depth.
Our project plan is to:
1. Develop a census of U.S. coworking facilities: through secondary research, outreach to the coworking community, and partnering with others who are creating coworking directories we will create a census of coworking facilities. Emergent Research has conducted an informal count of coworking facilities for the past two years. This project stage will formalize this count, making it more accurate.
2. Conduct two surveys augmented by in-person interviews. The first will survey coworking facility owners and identify key facility statistics such as size of the facility, number of desks and offices, services offered, number and type of members, etc.
The second will survey coworking facility users and will identify demographic and usage statistics such as user firm size, age of firm, number of employees, type of business, reasons for using coworking, etc.
In-person and telephone interviews will be used to augment the survey research, dive deeper on topics of interest (the role of social media in coworking, for example) and develop case studies.
We hope to finish the project in the late fall of this year. We will be making our research findings public.
So if you are interested in coworking, please drop by Coworking Labs. We will, of course, continue to post on coworking on this blog.
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