Most people now work in open plan offices, or at least in offices where the doors are usually open. Yet despite an interactive working environment, creating the best conditions forninnovation is still a challenge.
A shared space building in London's Shoreditch is being innovative itself – by doing things that actively encourage innovative approaches to commercial problems. And by collaborating with Virgin Media, it's putting ideas into action.
It's a very different kind of office. THECUBE was set up to defy conventional approaches to multi-tenancy premises by doing all it can to bring brains, friends and foes together.
A guiding principle is that the people coming up with the ideas should find it easy to share and develop them with others who work under the same roof, with large communal areas where people can talk and pool ideas. The belief is that more minds are always better than one, even if they're competitors or in seemingly unrelated fields. They also have access to the same, or even superior, high-speed internet infrastructure that large firms do.
It's a formula that's already paying off not only for the Cubers themselves but for their partners, as Virgin Media found out when it took one of its current challenges, through a process, called Platypus. The opportunity for Virgin Media was to bring a completely new slant to how its technology could be applied or sold by drawing on the diverse range of backgrounds and perspectives present amongst THECUBE's entrepreneurs.
The problem posed by Virgin Media to the Platypus team was to figure out how best to integrate a new generation of miniature wireless internet radio masts, which need to be high off the ground, into town and cities where doing so currently looks impractical or too expensive. The solution would need to ensure a great signal strength while also blending in with the urban environment.
"Not enough workplaces are designed to help innovation to thrive, so it happens despite the environment rather than because of it. THECUBE is trying to do things differently, so that brains are brought together rather than kept apart, and technology is used to help things happen rather than getting in the way," said Araceli Camargo, its founder.
THECUBE isn't held back by the usual need to keep making changes to telecoms services – mainly the amount of internet bandwidth people working there need - because it uses a service from Virgin Media Business called Big Red Internet. This gives unconstrained and lightning-fast internet access as standard, and customers use as much as they want without finding it creaking under the strain.
"You can't always see people as competitors, you've also got to see them as collaborators if they have complementary skills, and innovate together then commercialise those thoughts in different ways. In setting them free to work how they need to, the technology needs to be practically invisible, and just work no matter what they throw at it," said Araceli.
