
As part of the current "sharing economy" revolution, coworking facilities have transformed the creative marketplace. Since 2005, when the first coworking space was founded in San Francisco, the popularity of working in a shared environment has taken off. Today, hundreds of coworking facilities exist in cities of varying sizes across the world, supporting small businesses ranging from app developers to furniture makers to recording studios. But how have they grown so quickly? It’s all in the community. WeWork, which owns a number of coworking spaces worldwide, sums it up as “a place you join as an individual, ‘me,’ but where you become part of a greater ‘we.'”
At this point, the potential benefits of coworking spaces are well known, so much so that they’re practically common sense. To start, coworking spaces promote casual encounters between employees of different fields, creating a forum in which to quickly bounce ideas back and forth. This turns the office into a collective brainstorming session helping to create quicker, more efficient solutions.
Greater interaction can also provide networking opportunities for businesses. Working in close proximity to people in other fields that share similar values means your product will be the first in mind when neighbors need a service. Essentially, this creates a system with client-procurement and marketing included in the rent.
