Abstract:

This study explores the way in which industry, start-ups, students, researchers and public bodies reflect and argue regarding their own engagement in a Living lab. The aim is to create a focus on collaborative capabilities and to contribute to the understanding of how novel sharing economy trends (Bouncken & Reuschl, 2018) like coworking impacts workplaces, innovation and work-integrated learning.

Coworking redefine collaboration capability as a competitive advantage (Allred, Fawcett, Wallin, & Magnan, 2011). Coworking takes on the challenges of sharing equipment, ideas, and knowledge both within and between individuals and organizations. Coworking is challenging more traditional approaches to organizing and is actualized in Coworking spaces, living labs and maker spaces.

Actor-network theory based models are employed, unfolding coworking as it is revealed in interviews with representatives of participating tourism industry, students, researchers and public bodies. In the project researchers interview individuals linked to coworking. This model introduces concepts, relations and mechanisms, describing a current state discourse of meaning, membership and predictable behavior that shape and are shaped by facts, artifacts and relations, and how disturbance and other factors push the system toward some new future state discourse.

The analysis are based on probabilistic topic models that produce networks of words based on the interviews. This is a mathematical model that identify groups or communities of words that are related and that may illustrate the themes in the interviews. These networks are used to characterize the discourses of coworking found in the material.

The outcome describes the devlopment of discourses of coworking among the participants. We will use these discourses for discussing collaborative capabilities and how it impacts university-society collaboration. We will also present an online dashboard for further exporation of the material for the reader.

Keywords:

Coworking, work-integrated learning, actor-network theory, tourism.