Creativity — and the ideas for innovation it can produce — can’t be forced.
You can’t necessarily box someone up in an office or a cubicle, under the structure of a 9-to-5, take-an-hour-for-lunch day and expect him or her to come up with that creative idea for a new product, or that creative idea for how to handle a vexing problem, or that creative idea for how to improve a process.
More often than not, the creative process is supported by less structure, the kind that’s available in collaborative environments such as here at the Cooperative Venture Workspace.
White paper after white paper speaks to the equation of coworking space equaling innovation.
As the folks at Steelcase, the worldwide office furniture company said in one of those white papers, “The myth of the lone genius achieving one eureka after another in a closed room is a cartoonish, outdated cliché.”
Steelcase also points out that more and more people are understanding that a true eureka moment comes from people working together and, “mixing their ideas in a bouillabaisse of insights and laddered thinking.”
Members in the Workspace are getting this eureka moment first hand. Take our member Jonathan Day, director of business development at Sharper Selling, an internet marketing company that offers three main pillars of support for its clients: Paid search advertising, search engine optimization (SEO), and social media.
Day and his partner, marketing consultant Robert Rustici, are Workspace members, who found their eureka moment here.
“Without the collaboration we have at the Workspace, we wouldn’t have had our eureka moment where we discovered we could offer search engine optimization (SEO) services for free with a certain commitment to search engine marketing (SEM) services,” said Jonathan. “This strategic innovation has given us a competitive advantage over our competition in the digital marketing space and has become a key selling feature for our services.”
Jonathan also points out that his interaction with his business partner has been positivity impacted since joining the workspace.
“I’ve found that Workspace facilitates a level of interaction between Bob and I that we just didn’t have previously when working remotely, through email, and via various client meetings on the road,” said Jonathan. We are able to brainstorm creative ideas for our clients’ advertising campaigns and business strategies to grow our firm.”
Sharper Selling brainstorms these creative ideas in the spacious conference rooms that are
available at the Cooperative Venture Workspace. Meeting spaces such as these make it easier for businesses to collaborate and ultimately have this eureka moment.
At the Cooperative Venture Workspace, we also offer comfortable lounge areas to connect outside the constraints of a desk and a menu of memberships to fit the needs of the innovator and entrepreneur.
To point out what the Harvard Business Review whitepaper cited above noted: “In reality, people need to be able to craft their work in ways that give them purpose and meaning.”
Eureka.
The Cooperative Venture Workspace is evolution of the creative, shared workspace.