The Seattle Collaborative Space Alliance | We are here to unify, support and promote the coworking and collaborative space movement. 21 Inspirational Collaboration Workspaces. If your company isn't thinking about collaboration and creating an office design centered around collaboration, chances are that the office you've built is stuck in the doldrums. These days everyone wants to collaborate with other - it can help improve work by getting more minds thinking about the same problem, and it can be a fun, social experience where employees build community ties. According to a recent Gensler study, top companies tend to organize offices using collaboration as a key building block. But of course, collaborative spaces aren't built simply by putting people next to one another - but are instead an intentional space with the tools necessary for collaborative activities. Below are a few examples from a wide variety of companies. 22Squared BGT Partners Cheil Dreamhost Facebook Google Headvertising Horizon Media Kiva Microsoft Mono One & Co Pensar Quid Skype Three Drunk Monkeys TNT Express.
Collaboration Is a Team Sport, and You Need to Warm Up - Adam Richardson. This post is part of the HBR Insight Center Making Collaboration Work. Jimmy Guterman wrote about Nokia’s culture of purposefully fostering a collaborative mindset as soon as someone started at the company or moves into a new role. I want to build on this by looking at how collaboration needs to be seen as a process that happens over time, and that the crucial groundwork for successful collaboration needs to be laid before the “actual” collaborative work happens.
First, let’s ask why collaboration is so important today. The main reason is that the problems we have to solve — whether deciding company strategy or bringing an innovative offering to market — are more complex than they have ever been. They require a variety of skillsets, perspectives, and approaches to solve them, and need a lot of pieces to come together smoothly to be successful. But there are barriers to collaboration, many of which exist even before somebody arrives for their first day of work. . * Mix up disciplines. Innovation Place. Inventing the Collaborative Workspace - Adam Richardson. Most corporate buildings don’t do a good job of supporting collaboration, brainstorming, and innovative work methods. They tend to be dominated by cubicles or offices which are suited for individual work, or by hard-to-book conference rooms that teams can use but only for short periods of time.
What’s needed is a more flexible space that better supports teams and inspires more open thinking. These are common at design firms such as frog where I work, but rare in corporate settings. I recently saw one such space when I was invited to give a talk at Citrix, the Silicon Valley-based maker of GoToMeeting and virtualization and cloud software, as part of their Design Salon speaker series. The talk was held in the company’s recently completed design collaboration space, a large open area where multiple disciplines can come together to innovate. I asked Catherine Courage, VP of Product Design at Citrix, to talk more about how the space came about and how it’s working in practice: Who uses it? D.school: Institute of Design at Stanford. Why Design Matters to Me - Using Design to Make a Difference.