Collaborative Spaces and Coworking as Hybrid Workspaces: Friends or Foes of Learning and Innovation?

The present chapter deals with coworking spaces as hybrid organizations and their impact on learning and innovation. Organizations have been seeking collaborative layouts for decades, and work layouts that could boost creativity and innovation are at the core of several streams of research in the Organization Design discipline. In this perspective, coworking spaces are at the frontier of innovation. On the other hand, the coworking spaces are conditioned by technology evolution and in particular by digital technologies, core in operation and innovation management research field. The emerging of coworking spaces adds even more interest on the subject, and raises interesting questions both from a theoretical and a practical point of view. Coworking spaces are growing worldwide at astonishing rates (4th Global Coworking Survey, 2015, Deskmag). They combine the need to cope with financial restraints with the opportunity of leveraging technological solutions to design workspaces that are coherent with the contemporary megatrends.