Beate Ehrhardt, Research Fellow at the Institute for Mathematical Innovation, has published a paper entitled “Coworking spaces: a place-based approach for skill development in left-behind regions“, following a study examining the impact of coworking spaces (CWS) on skills development within different regions.
Summary
Drawing on survey data from 161 coworking spaces (CWSs) across 74 International Territorial Level 3 (ITL-3) regions in the UK, the study examined the impact of CWSs on skill development across two key domains: social-cognitive (SC) and technical-digital (TD) skills. The findings suggests that CWSs are associated with the development of both SC and TD skills. Notably, the researchers observed regional variation in how these skills were acquired. In left-behind regions, members of CWSs particularly benefitted from the structured resources offered by CWSs, such as access to physical infrastructure and targeted training opportunities; whereas in non-left-behind regions, skill development tends to emerge more organically, bottom-up, through informal social interactions within CWSs. The group concluded by emphasising the importance of incorporating CWSs into place-based policy discussions and their potential as vehicles to shape local skills strategies, particularly in left-behind regions.
Beate’s contribution
Building on the method adopted by Gauger et al. (2021), Beate employed a keyword-based web scraping technique using a Google Maps crawler. This approach yielded an exhaustive list of 1,534 operational CWSs, complete with details including CWS names, addresses, official website URLs, and contact numbers. Beate further enhanced the dataset by manually verifying missing information, such as email addresses and LinkedIn profiles. This database provided a robust sampling frame for an online survey targeted at all operational CWSs across the UK as of November 2022 enabling a representative analysis of the UK’s coworking landscape.
To view more papers published by Beate and the rest of the IMI team, see our publications page.