LEXC is a network of coworking spaces that are banding together to give their members access to great workspaces across the country.

For CoCo members, this means you now have have preferred access to coworking spaces when you visit other cities. Your first day at another LEXC space is free. You can book subsequent days at a 20% discount.

There are six founding venue partners across the nation:

• NextSpace in Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area
• BLANKSPACES in Los Angeles
• Link Coworking in Austin
• WorkBar in Boston
• CoCo in Minneapolis
• 654 Croswell in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Interested in working at any of these spaces? You can book a room or a day pass using your LiquidSpace account. The LEXC Coworking Visa system, powered by LiquidSpace, manages member access permissions and unlocks special member privileges across the network. Members of individual Coworking spaces that join LEXC are trusted across the network and can book and check in to any LEXC space in realtime using the iPhone, Android (coming soon) and web interfaces enabled by LiquidSpace.

For more information, visit http://lexc.org or ask your CoCo hosts!

Well, how about giving them the gift of CoCo?

Introducing the CoCo Work Spa. It’s the perfect gift to give to someone who works in the office all day and needs to get away.

With a CoCo Work Vacation, they can spend a peaceful, productive day away from their day-to-day grind to get caught up on work, to work on their novel – or even better to work on  the startup they’ve been dreaming about!

What’s included in the CoCo Work Spa package?

• A day pass to any CoCo location
• Lunch ordered in from Republic in Minneapolis, or Golden’s Deli in St. Paul
• A CoCo swag bag that includes CoCo Blend whole bean coffee, a CoCo t-shirt and other surprises!
• Bonus extra: new friends and coworkers

It’s a gift that’s guaranteed to provide energy and inspiration!

• Format: Gift certificate
  
• Cost: $75
• Delivery: you can pick up  the certificate or have us mail it directly to the recipient.

Buy now

Flickr photo by bgottsab

Besides coffee, it’s technology that keeps our members humming. If the Wi-Fi is on the blink, or if a laptop is down, it’s an emergency.

That’s why we’re pleased to announce a partnership The Foundation, a company that is known for providing comprehensive IT support to creative businesses. Now they’ll be bringing concierge IT services to CoCo members.

The Foundation works with both Macs and PCs and all manner of networks and data storage. But what’s noteworthy is that as an Apple Value Added Seller, The Foundation is able to provide warranty repair services on all Apple products. What’s more, their repair depot is only minutes away. So, if your machine bites the dust, you don’t have to chase out to the Apple store. The Foundation comes to you.

In fact, The Foundation has gone so far as to create an outpost at CoCo Minneapolis. You’ll find them at the campsite nearest the front desk. Just look for the distinctive orange banners. On many days, you’ll see Matt Woestehoff and other Foundation crew members hanging out in the space. Matt is available for any tech questions free of charge, so feel free to approach him.

In addition to tech support, The Foundation is planning a series of educational classes, focused on personal and business technology, to CoCo. Look for class and workshop announcements soon!

• On-site host/concierge services
• Morning pastries from Aster Cafe
• Espresso drinks
• Daily lunch menu (including vegetarian options) from Republic
• On-site tech support for Apple and PC products
• Bike and hourly car rental facilities
• Storage facilities
• Access to Minneapolis Grain Exchange health club
• A weekly videocast by Chuck Olsen of the The UpTake
• Live podcasts by the Minnov8 gang
• A full lineup of social and educational events and activities (see below)

We’ll communicate more about these items as the details are finalized! Meanwhile, do you have any suggestions?

Photo credit: tonx

A tabula rasa: the trading floor of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange (photo by Chuckumentary)

What’s the sound of 1 hand clapping? Who knows. But we can tell you that the sound of 10 hands sanding down a 100-year old wood floor is deafening!

As you read this, the trading floor of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange is being restored to its original lustre. The electricians have already run miles of power and data cables, so after a few coats of polyurethane next week, the space is going to be ready for brand new Steelcase furniture!

However…that furniture doesn’t arrive until July 7. As a result, we’re push our opening date for coworkers to July 12.

Our post-and-beam structural pieces arrive a week later and require some time to be installed, so we won’t be able to open our campsites until July 25.

All this gives us a little bit of breathing room and lets us extend our pre-registration offer (register now to lock in current rates for 6 months) to July 12! Learn more info on the offer.

So a quick recap for the skimmers among us:

CoCo Minneapolis rollout schedule

• July 12: Coworking begins Tuesday, July 12
• July 25: Campsites (group coworking spaces) open
• July 12: Pre-registration offer (current rates for 6 months) More info

Group spaces are going fast!
We’ve been surprised by the demand for group coworking spaces and permanent desks at CoCo Minneapolis. These spaces, or “campsites” as we call them, come in 3 sizes:

• Large Campsite (fits 8 people): sold out
• Medium Campsite (fits 6 people): 6 remaining
• Small Campsite (fits 4 people): 2 remaining
• Single Campsite (desk for 1 person): 2 remaining

If you are thinking about housing your team at CoCo, please contact us or visit one of our open houses, so we can answer your questions and help you make plans!

The floor plan below shows you which campsites are already reserved as of 6/28.

Key: SC = single campsite, L = large campsite, M = medium campsite, S = small campsite

In his State of the City address today, Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak announced that CoCo and Project Skyway will be teaming up in Minneapolis.

CoCo and Project Skyway have been looking separately for locations in Minneapolis. At the urging of the city, the two groups decided to operate out of the same space. A final space has not been selected, but the teams are considering buildings in downtown Minneapolis, near-Northeast, Loring Park and North Loop.

For CoCo, this will be its second location and will feature specially designed collaborative settings designed by the commercial furniture maker Steelcase. The new space will also feature several meeting locations for use by members for everyday meetings and by visiting organizations for off-site meetings.

About Project Skyway
Project Skyway is Minnesota’s first seed-stage tech startup accelerator program for motivated entrepreneurs. The program will build connections among entrepreneurs, mentors, investors, and other innovation hubs, and bring them together both online and in physical space. The vision places emphasis on building companies with long-term, sustainable value, ethical practices, mentorship, and strong networks.

Project Skyway, Launch.MN and CoCo members pose with Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak after his State of the City address. (l-r) Jeff Heegaard, Kyle Coolbroth, Judy Grundstrom, John Montague, Darren Cox, R.T. Rybak and Don Ball.

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?

Photo credit: freedigitalphotos.net

But as it turns out, we might not have been too far off the mark. Within the next week, we’ll have a corporate department actually take up residence with us for a couple months while their office digs get shuffled around. Meanwhile, another major corporation in town has asked us about conducting offsites and coworking – apparently in hopes of getting a boost of creativity and insights into our work culture. So, perhaps there are some cubicle dwellers who see benefits in getting out of the office.

But what about the many corporate workers who don‘t work in cubicles? Telecommuters? Sales reps? ROWE workers? A USA Today article about coworking suggests that the benefits of coworking – namely working with adults – might hold some promise for corporate nomads as well:

A new study of 3,600 telecommuters commissioned by Microsoft revealed their No. 1 complaint was lack of face-to-face interaction.

So, tell us please: If you are a corporate denizen or a telecommuter, do you see value in occasionally taking the team in a different environment (different than a hotel ballroom, for example) for ideation, problem solving or other creative meetings?  Or for individual employees to occasionally work offsite? How useful would it be to make connections with other smart people from outside your organization? Honestly, we’d love to hear from you – particularly about what ideas you have for bringing coworking and the cubicle closer together.

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We would also appreciate any feedback on some of the new services we’re thinking of offering:

• Team coworking – where a department, workgroup or project team could visit CoCo for meetings and collaborative work sessions. These meetings could be facilitated (we know a few good facilitators of various stripes!) or not.
• Corporate daycamps -  an invitation-only event* that includes breakfast, a morning lecture/discussion on a hot topic, followed by a day of coworking (and very likely some good conversation and cross-pollination.)
• Private offsites – like the above, an organization could have its own daycamp, in which we would provide breakfast, a lecture/discussion and an afternoon of coworking in a private room, or in our open areas.
• Speaker’s Bureau – we’ve already had some great speakers at CoCo. The topics they’ve covered include social media, IP law, blogging, marketing strategy and GTD, to name a few. We want to formalize this somewhat by creating a stable of speakers in different domains, who are available to speak authoritatively to visiting corporate groups.**

* Why invite-only? One of the issues we anticipate is that corporate employees might have trouble (or perceive too great a risk) mixing it up with the competition. So, our idea would be to invite employees from like departments at non-competing companies (e.g., Target, UHC, 3M and Ameriprise).

**If you are an expert in your domain and would like to be part of our Speaker’s Bureau, please contact us. Our goal would be to have a short list of 10-15 experts who are visible and credible and would bring value to our guests. (In case you’re wondering, yes, it would be a paying gig.)

We’ve also cut the cost of our day rate to $30.

• Buy a coworking pass

• See our plans & pricing

Creative Commons photo by Stewf