CoCo’s going corporate!

The strangest thing has happened on the way to the coworking revolution. It seems that coworking (and all that gooey collaborative goodness inside) is not only appealing to freelancers and consultants, but to corporate folks, too.

Since we’ve launched CoCo, we’ve been approached by a handful of corporations, often by the groups responsible for innovation or change management, and often with a similar question: “How can we get in on this?”

Now, you might that coworking and collaboration are anathema to the button-down, risk-averse, by-the-book style of many corporations. But these are strange times we live in. And it doesn’t take a genius to see that innovation has become the order of the day. Not just as a one-time thing, but as a permanent way of doing business. As a result, many companies are asking, “how can we make innovation part of our culture?”

One way innovation happens is through the thoughtful, deliberate and continuous introduction of new ideas, new processes, new technology and new team. And, well that’s what we’re trying to put together at CoCo.

So, long story short, we’re gonna run with this whole idea of corporate coworking. Or better put: that a coworking space is just the environment where corporate innovators can try on new ways of working and meeting, with the goal of bringing these ideas back to the nest. Or perhaps never going back to the nest! (see ROWE)

We still have to finalize some text and post it on our site, but below are some of efforts we’re contemplating on the corporate side. We’d love to get your feedback on whether you feel these offerings would be meaningful.

OOO passes – As in “get Out Of the Office.” The idea here is to help corporate employees recharge their batteries by getting away from the cubicle farm by taking a work vacation at CoCo. Could managers offer OOO passes as rewards or incentives – or simply because it fuels innovation?

Corporate DayCamps – We already run DayCamps that are open to the public. The model would be the same: an authority on a given subject would give a presentation and then moderate a peer-to-peer conversation amongst attendees. But are there topics that would be of interest to managers from different non-competing companies? The answer’s probably yes, but obviously we’ll need to cue up speakers and subjects that are particularly meaningful to people working within larger organizations.

War rooms - Project teams that need to focus, or want the stimulation of a new and creative environment, could camp out in one our many worksites, which would be equipped out with big whiteboards, work tables and lounge furniture.

Corporate sponsorships – What if a handful of companies pitched in to make coworking free? With a good number of sponsored coworking seats, we would be able to hand-pick leaders in different disciplines and invite them to be part of the community. We might call them “CoCo Fellows.” Think tanks work roughly on this model. Only this would be an innovation tank. And once a quarter, we’d convene a daylong conference in which our sponsors and the CoCo Fellows get together and do a deep dive on an issue of the sponsors’ choosing.

Innovation Labs – Ideation and creative problem solving are central to innovation. But how do you innovate on command? Drawing on previous consulting experience, we’re refining a methodology that will take advantage of collaborative meeting approaches (and our resident genius coworkers) to help companies generate, evaluate and implement breakthrough ideas. Each Lab would take place at CoCo over multiple consecutive days and would involve peer-to-peer meeting approaches (see Open Space, DeBono, etc.), rapid prototyping, operational assessment and internal communications planning.

We’ve got a few more ideas in the hopper, but this should be enough to get the ball rolling. What do you think? Do you toil for a large corporation? In your position are you feeling the pressure to innovate? If so, would any of these ideas hold some promise for helping you meet those demands?

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