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The need to understand work processes and end-users has become an issue in corporate real estate and workplace management. Flexible work practices and technological advancement allow end-users to move outside the building boundaries. This influences workplace management to become more service-oriented and demand-driven, and better serve the needs of end-users. For that, this paper aims to investigate the ways in which new workplace services support the knowledge creation processes of mobile workers.

This study is exploratory and follows a multiple-case study strategy. Literature is reviewed on workplace and knowledge theories, and the market analysis consists of data from 57 firms that offer services to support the mobile knowledge worker.

Workplace services were categorized into three new groups that support knowledge creation processes for the mobile knowledge worker in various work environments. The analysis indicated that new services are driven by technological development and community formation around the physical or virtual place.

The proposed service groups can be examined as new business opportunities by workplace service providers, and the results suggest that the CRE managers should re-think their service portfolios, boost their collaboration with the service providers and invest in building a community.

This paper categorizes workplace services from a mobile knowledge worker perspective and follows a service-oriented approach to workplace management.

This study aims to identify institutional work mechanisms that public actors employ in market shaping.

The paper uses an abductive theorizing process, combining a literature review with an empirical exploration of three different market-shaping contexts.

The study identifies 20 granular mechanisms of institutional work that market-shaping public actors employ. These mechanisms are all potentially employable in creating, maintaining or disrupting markets. Institutional work vis-à-vis individual institutions may differ in direction from the institutional work vis-à-vis the market system. Public actors are not a homogeneous group but may have different values and support competing institutional logics even when operating in the same market.

The empirical data were limited to three cases in three small open economies. Data collected from other markets and with other methods would provide more rigorous insight into market-shaping public actors.

The findings revealed institutional work mechanisms that public actors can use to shape markets. Companies wanting to engage public actors in market shaping should be aware of the values and institutional logics that influence market-shaping public actors.

The paper unites and expands on the scattered knowledge regarding institutional work in market shaping. It illuminates and dissects the role of public actors in market shaping, challenging the reactive stance that is often assigned to them. The study provides a better understanding of how conflicting market views affect markets. It also brings insights into the interplay between market-shaping actions and the multiple levels of market systems.

The purpose of this paper is to study whether researchers from different disciplines have different requirements for workplaces.

A literature review aimed to understand the academic workplace requirements of different disciplines. The empirical data were gathered by a national survey conducted in Finland. Open-ended questions accumulated answers, which were analysed and clustered.

The analysis implies that the majority of researchers in all the disciplinary categories required places that support both concentration and interaction. When comparing those researchers who asked for a place that only supports either concentration or interaction, the majority of those working in soft-pure disciplines required spaces to support concentration and those in soft-applied disciplines required spaces to support interaction. Researchers from hard disciplines – both applied and pure – consider places supporting concentration or interaction to be equally important.

The weakness of this study is the generalisability, as this survey was conducted in Finland. The analysis emphasised diversity between disciplines without analysing diversity within disciplines.

Facilities and real estate managers can gain a deeper understanding of the academics’ workplace requirements, which in turn can help them to enhance workplace support of productivity at the same time as cutting real estate costs.

This study contributes to the body of research on academic office design.

Today, academic work includes increasingly informal and collaborative activities. This research attempts to determine whether stakeholders in the development of learning spaces in higher education could benefit from the principles of co-working space. This paper aims to determine whether a need exists for co-working space as a learning space solution from the viewpoint of academic space users. This determination will be made by examining the following research question: How does the co-working space concept meet user expectations regarding academic space?

The research question is answered by investigating users’ experiences of existing learning spaces in higher education in light of future workplace needs. Users’ requirements are examined by analysing user experience survey and interviews. The results are confirmed by focus group interviews and examined in the light of co-working space characteristics that are identified in the literature from the viewpoint of workplace management by searching for similarities between descriptions in the literature and the empirical data.

This research suggests that academic space users would appreciate it if the spaces they use would reflect some of the co-working space characteristics. These characteristics are community, multipurpose office, high accessibility and attractive workplace. A less applicable co-working space characteristic is space as service.

The results of this study are based on one case, which limits the generalisability of the results.

The results provide suggestions for corporate real estate management and stakeholders in academic institutions to consider when renovating outdated spaces.

The paper expands the literature on learning spaces in higher education and related practices by linking it with co-working spaces, thereby contributing to a field that has not yet been explored in depth.

Future places for learning and working are digitally and physically integrated hybrid environments. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the co-creation process of the remote presence-based digital and physical co-working and co-learning place. The context is cross-cultural when Finnish space approach is applied and further developed in Namibia.

A qualitative case study is conducted of the Future Tech Lab (FT Lab) in the University of Namibia’s main campus. The case study of the FT Lab is about 200m² space with three different zones in the University of Namibia’s main campus. The physical solution encourages collaboration and technical solutions interlink the place overseas by using the remote presence. The data are gathered by using document analysis, observations, participatory workshops and interviews including structured questionnaire.

The action design research approach is a functional framework to co-create hybrid environments in two ways. It helps to design digital and physical solutions as integrated entity. Additionally, it provides a tool to analyse decision-making processes as well as design initiatives, also from the cultural perspective. Both Finnish and Namibian cultures are normative and feminine, which helped the realisation of the project based on mutual trust. However, the differences in power distance were affecting the process fluency and decision-making processes.

The findings indicate that the co-design of the hybrid-learning environment sets requirements for the physical solution such as surface materials for premises and retrofitting of technology, which need to be considered by co-creation from the shared vision to realisation of the space. The co-creation involves many stakeholders, and cultural differences have a different impact on various stages of the co-creation process.

The cultural context in the case study provides an interesting comparison between the Finnish and Namibian approach. The remote presence and its requirements provide new knowledge and guidelines for co-creation of hybrid environments.

This paper aims to develop a conceptual framework based on the identification and examination of the mechanisms (termed “viability mechanisms”) under which market-shaping activities yield the emergence of a viable market: one able to adapt to the changing environment over time while remaining stable enough for actors to benefit from it.

This paper uses extant literature to build a conceptual framework identifying viability mechanisms for market shaping and a case illustration examining how a viable market for Finnish timber high-rise buildings was created. The case exemplifies how the identified viability mechanisms are practically manifested through proactive market shaping.

The proposed conceptual framework incorporates four viability mechanisms identified in the extant literature: presence of dissipative structures, consonance among system elements, resonance among system elements and reinforcing and balancing feedback loops. It illustrates how these mechanisms are manifested in a contemporary case setting resulting in a viable market.

First, firms and other market-shaping organizations should look for, or themselves foster, viability mechanisms within their market-shaping strategies. Second, as failure rates in innovation are extremely high, managers should seek to identify or influence viability mechanisms to avoid premature commercialization of innovations.

This study identifies how these viability mechanisms permit markets to emerge and survive over time. Further, it illuminates the workings of the non-linear relationship between actor-level market-shaping actions and system-level market changes. As such, it provides a “missing link” to the scholarly and managerial discourse on market-shaping strategies. Unlike much extant market-shaping literature, this study draws substantively on the systems literature.

The purpose of this paper is to describe, discuss and analyze forerunner cases from three different decades in workplace concept development in Sweden and Finland and discuss the transformation over time to better facilitate management of office development and disseminate Nordic experiences.

The reflecting paper is discussing the development of workplace concepts. It is based on case studies collected from 1980s to the new millennium. The reflection is based on the perspective of Nordic culture. The characteristics of the Nordic culture used in the paper are low power distance and individualism.

The evolution from “office as a city” to “city as an office” has taken place in both countries and Nordic cultural values have provided fruitful platform for them. However, the layer of organizational culture in the studied workplaces also has an impact on the development and implication of the concepts.

The selection of case studies is limited to two Nordic countries only. The comparison of all five Nordic countries could increase the understanding of Nordic culture and similarities and differences between the countries. The study could be deepened by a more thorough literature review including not only Nordic but also European cases.

The dilemma of management when designing workspaces for the changing world is in that individuals increasingly choose where to work, when, with whom and how. Facilitating that freedom of choice is a balancing act in modern workspace design where people is a scarcer resource than space. It requires an active management that sees their facilities as a part of their system not as a costly box top put it in.

Easy access seems to be the key to the workspace of the future when decision power shifts from organizations to individuals. Simultaneously, individuals need to take more and more responsibility and action to get their job done: the cases illustrate how this has been done and that the integration and interaction between office concepts and office work will need to be on business agendas.

The perspective of Nordic workplace concept development from 1980s provide the material for future development, without an understanding of the past one cannot understand the future.

New ways of working challenge workplace management: increasing mobility and diminishing organizational boundaries require re-evaluation of both workplace design and service delivery. However, structures and processes of workplace management are still traditional, and managers, together with outsourced facility service providers, often do not succeed at fulfilling the needs of mobile employees. The aforementioned changes stimulate discussions in many areas in both industry and academy. Nevertheless, workplace literature from business perspective seems to be scarce. In this paper, the focus is on workplace service offering for mobile knowledge workers. This paper aims to study the current state of workplace servitization. To answer this, the authors identify value offering elements that are used in office business market to deliver workplace as a service.

This study follows multiple case study methodology including five case studies. Primary data were collected through interviews with workplace service providers. Secondary data included observations and publicly available data. The authors took business model design approach to study selected business offerings.

The results indicate that workplace business models include elements of servitization on various levels. Physical space is no longer the central offering in the office business; instead, it acts as a component on which the service portfolio is built. The highest value from workplace comes from experience-related service offerings.

Academically, research contributes to the workplace management studies by providing servitization perspective to a topic previously approached with a more technical and psychological point of view. This study can also support service providers and customer organizations in their quest to make service provision more flexible and experience-oriented.

This paper aims to categorize the typologies of co-working spaces and describe their main characteristics.

The aim is reached by means of analyzing 15 co-working spaces located in the capital area of Finland. The data used consist of interviews, websites, event presentations and brochures.

As a result, six co-working space typologies were identified: public offices, third places, collaboration hubs, co-working hotels, incubators and shared studios. The categorization was made by using two axes: business model (for profit and non-profit) and level of user access (public, semi-private and private).

The results provide a viewpoint on how co-working spaces can be categorized.

In practise, the results can be applied by all stakeholders who are working with alternative workplace solutions to respond to the needs of new ways of working, especially via workplace services for multi-locational and flexible working, including facilities managers, corporate real estate executives and designers.

This research builds on the previous academic literature on co-working spaces by making the phenomena more explicit for researchers and practitioners who are facing the challenges of developing new alternative workplace offerings.