IDEO's Tom Kelley offers up one of the most useful overviews of innovation available as a book. The book, The Ten Faces of Innovation, outlines 10 personalities/disciplines that make up effective innovation in firms. This underscores a couple of things. First, that innovation is collaborative and interdisciplinary. Secondly, that cross-disciplinary collaboration requires cultural openness and spatial openness. That is, you need the people and the space.

Creative Output

If innovation can be defined, as Kelley does, as people generating value through the creation of new things, then coworking is clearly laying down innovation tracks like an old-school drummer. I've talked quite a bit here about Austin-based Conjunctured, a coworking company that has just launched. Round 3 Media, which has grown out of the creative churn at Indy Hall in Philly, is another innovative output that has grown out of the coworking soup.

Here at SXSW I've learned of another group with has a foot in coworking, specifically at Citizen Desk in Wassau, WI. Marcus (and colleagues in San Francisco and Seattle) is launching a new firm--User Voice--which brings a kind of virtual focus group capability for companies keen on mining consumer insight through deep analytics that can scale as the community of users grows.

At the Hat Factory in San Francisco, Geek Entertainment TV has some of its people in the house, hanging with developers from different fields and firms, cross pollinating. And at the Creative Space in Bryan, Texas, the guys are doing countless cool things, not the least of which is creating the anti-conference BIL that co-exists with the better-known conference TED.

Cultural Innovation

From an anthropological perspective, the cultural innovation that drives these specific business innovations is awesome. Innovation in terms of pioneering new ways of working is in itself a critically important source of innovation. This new way--coworking--embodies most of the elements of space and personalities that Tom Kelley writes about in his book. As Jelly coworking grows and forms its own types of communities, and as new tangible coworking spaces (like Launchpad Coworking here in Austin) come online, it is reasonable to suggest that the innovation outputs from this cultural scene will continue to bubble out.

If they had either the humility or curiosity to listen and learn, surely there are lessons here for BigCo. If BigCo wants to witness pure innovation in its essence, just contact one of the firms listed above, ring them up, and go spend a day hanging about. Innovation is Who, How and Where. Most companies out there have the wrong people working in the wrong ways in the wrong spaces. Innovation is, first, a cultural thing, and secondly, a business thing... To some extent you either get it or you don't.

The Butcher