Could radical work spaces mean the end of the office?

“If the likes of McKinsey have built a global office infrastructure and talent pool of hundreds of thousands of people, why can’t those working at the edge of a new sustainable economy enjoy the same thing?” asks Jonathan Robinson. “Together, they would kick some arse.”

Robinson made the first step towards proving this possible in 2005, when, along with three friends, he founded the Hub, an international network of spaces where social and environmental innovators can work, meet and share ideas.

What set the young anthropology graduate off on this mission was his disappointment at the university careers fair, where a rather “feckless” charity offering stood in complete contrast to the corporate milk round. Yet neither, he felt, seemed to offer anything for those who had enterprising ideas for change in the world, but who lacked the resources, guts or experience to start out on their own.

iPhone in hand, MacBook in the other, Robinson himself is a perfect example of the motivated, mobile working entrepreneurs he hoped to interest in his idea. And he recognised the smart business move in inviting thousands of other talented individuals to join his ‘club’. As he puts it, the company “wouldn’t own or even pay for them; indeed, they would pay us”.

Today 3,000 entrepreneurs, policy-makers, freelance professionals and corporate executives do indeed pay to be part of this growing network of Hubs. Their monthly membership fee of between £10 and £300 (or the equivalent in each local economy) buys them access to hot desks, wifi and expertise at one of 15 serviced business-cum-social innovation centres around the world.

The Hubs’ USP (‘unique selling point’), says Robinson, is the way they use “the power of physical space to provoke and inspire”. In Islington, north London, the Hub is a refurbished warehouse with exposed brick and a wood-chip boiler; in Brussels, it’s a converted chocolate factory; in Mumbai, a high-rise building overlooking the Arabian Sea. Inside, each is designed to encourage interaction, with open plan areas, curvaceous shared desks, cushion-strewn chill-out corners and a cosy kitchen.

Even the communities that use Hubs are ‘designed’, giving the place a certain cachet. Robinson’s team ‘seeds’ these in each location by headhunting 30 or so founding members: professionals who can bring the unusual mix of skills that are needed to cross-fertilise ideas. Specially trained Hub ‘hosts’ act as catalysts, bringing members together for workshops on challenges, such as raising seed capital or entering a foreign market. Convening peers in a supportive network to critique ideas early on, is essential, says Robinson, when three out of five UK businesses fail within the first three years.

So far, the Hub has fostered more than 1,500 ethical enterprises. Success stories include Lightweight Medical, a company which designs healthcare products that reduce waste, and Onzo, the smart metering outfit that started off as a “maverick one-and-a-half person venture”, and now employs 100 staff, with sales of £10 million.

Robinson’s careful “condition-setting”, as he calls it, is not only good for start-ups; it’s also key to his own business model. The congenial atmosphere, the hot desking, the late-night opening hours are all special ingredients in driving value from Hub properties. 

“It borrows from the best of an office, a café, a theatre, an events space…”

“We pack people in with high density and use the space effectively at different times of the day,” he explains. A Hub’s layout accommodates one person every 50 square feet: three times the density of an average office. And, because its design cleverly “borrows from the best of an office, a café, a theatre, an events space”, local Hub hosts can hire them out for film screenings, talks or classes. The buildings “serve one function at breakfast, another function over lunch, or dinner…”

On average, Hubs bring in three times more revenue per square foot than conventional rent-a-desk outfits (£100 per year in the UK). But are they actually making money? The most successful among them have 25% profit margins, but they do have higher base costs than ‘rent-a-desk’ competitors.

Each Hub needs £200,000-£500,000 to get up and running – a sum which prospective local Hub operators must raise upfront. This covers training hosts and creating the founding membership community, initial rental deposits (all Hubs are rented properties), and a fee to the central company, known as Hub World.

The business model might sound like a conventional franchise, with Hubs around the world paying a fee and a slice of their revenue to its founding fathers. But Robinson insists that, as fluffy as it may sound, the set up is more of a partnership. Those who operate individual Hubs have voting rights in the way the company is run, rather than simply paying to use the company identity, and will eventually receive a share of the central profit – once this starts to materialise.

Taken together, the global turnover of all 15 stands at £2.5 million, while Hub World itself has an annual revenue of £500,000. Overall, the business’s growth capital still relies heavily on small investments from over 100 individuals around the world.

“If they were investing in anything, it was our determination”

At least today’s potential backers can see living, breathing examples of the Hub concept – unlike when Robinson and his mates made the first sell back in 2002. “I’m not sure if they ever ‘got it’,” he says of the investors who put up the £200,000 needed to do up that first derelict building in Islington. The four did, however, manage to convince 12 “friends of friends”, along with social investment fund Venturesome to part with the cash. “If they were investing in anything”, says Robinson, “it was in our determination.”

With a target of opening 200 Hubs in total, 68 of them by 2013, there’s some serious fundraising still to be done. Robinson thinks he may have found the answer in a multi- million pound green property fund that he’s scoping in partnership with a major ethical bank. It’s a prime example of ‘crowd-sourced investment’. The company is looking to its 3,000 ethically minded members, and the 40,000 guests who visit Hubs worldwide on a regular basis, to buy the first bonds, which start at a manageable £100. Administered by the bank but clearly earmarked as Hub bonds, the idea is that investors will receive interest on debt repayments. The money will go into the eco-refurbishment of future Hubs around the world.

Robinson’s plans for expansion also include some risky-sounding locations, such as Kabul and Gaza. He believes the model could work there, after seeing an inspirational ‘peace hub’ in Mostar, at the height of the Bosnian civil war. There, a bakery brought together a refreshing mix of UN diplomats, activists, Serbs and Croats. “In war zones,” he says, “there’s no shortage of people who want to engage in rebuilding their countries. But there is a huge lack of infrastructure – and a tendency for large American companies to come in and mess it all up!”

The ambition’s clearly there to take on the big guys. Robinson’s keen to develop Hubs beyond just cleverly designed spaces for innovation and enterprise, into a network that can draw on the expertise of its diverse, inter-disciplinary global membership to solve all sorts of problems. He talks of it as “a globally connected multi-local infrastructure for change”.

Here, though, even fans sound a note of warning. “It’s definitely a compelling idea,” comments the Work Foundation’s Associate Director, Stephen Overell. “But whether you can have an ‘anti-organisation’ organisation is an interesting question. Can people coming together to run different projects work together in a cohesive way without a framework?”

Fair comment, perhaps – but if Robinson had followed conventional thinking, he certainly wouldn’t be where he is today.

“Our aspiration in the coming years,” he says with a flourish, “is that the Obama administration doesn’t phone McKinsey for help on solving climate change, it phones the Hub.”

And perhaps his audacity will take him halfway there. 

Hannah Bullock is Campaigns and Communications Manager at the Eden Project.

22 January 2010

Hannah Bullock