Social Innovation Research On Coworking Clusters
Innovation is a territorial cooperation process involving different categories of stakeholders for the designing of new products and services. Innovation may therefore be considered as a response to the economic crisis. In many Mediterranean territories, independent workers sharing offices are increasingly co-designing innovative products with an observed high level of competitiveness and sustainability. Hence, addressing the "innovation gap" that characterizes Mediterranean territories, COWORKMed will develop a new model of entrepreneurship and social innovation by favouring cooperation and operational bridging between public actors, universities, training centres and "mainstream" clusters together with civil society. COWORKMed will promote co-working processes and their transnational organization as a lever of social innovation in Mediterranean. Indeed, innovative products emerging from the cooperation of independent workers sharing offices could benefit more and better to "mainstream" clusters. Optimizing this contribution could also allow the transnational activity of key clusters through the implementation of a mobility scheme connecting ideas and people from co-working areas of the MED metropolitan areas. In order to assess the qualitative and quantitative potential of such synergies, COWORKMed will gather a multidisciplinary and pluralistic partnership able to carry out a study that could pave the way to future testing activities.