In the making: Open Creative Labs as an emerging topic in economic geography?

Abstract

In the past 15 years, we have witnessed an upsurge of collaborative spaces providing an arena for individual and collective creativity, (co)creating craft‐based products, urban manufacturing, and experimentation with business or creative ideas using innovative technologies such as 3D printing or CNC milling machines. The discourses on spaces such as coworking, hacker‐ or makerspaces, accelerators, Fab Labs, and open workshops promise new communities, more innovation, and a transformation of work. This has called for interdisciplinary scholarly attention, primarily from organization and management studies, sociology, and entrepreneurship studies. However, little attention has so far been paid to this development from the perspective of geography. This paper employs Open Creative Labs as an umbrella term for the diversity of spaces and aims at, first, providing an overview of recent interdisciplinary perspectives on the functions of labs in coordinating creativity and entrepreneurship, as well as the motivations of users to utilize these spaces for their projects, and, second, offers an approach to a multiscalar spatial conceptualizations of labs. The paper concludes by exploring policy implications that may benefit from an economic‐geography perspective.

‘I have so little time […] I got shit I need to do’: Critical perspectives on making and sharing in Manchester’s FabLab

“…The last 15 years have witnessed the global emergence and expansion of different types of open innovation spaces, providing an arena for individual and collective creativity through the creation of craft-based products and experimentation with business or creative ideas using innovative technologies such as 3D printing or CNC [computer numerical control] milling machines (Schmidt, 2019). Such spaces are described using terms such as 'open labs ', 'open workshops', 'makerspaces', 'hackerspaces' and 'FabLabs'.…”

Open Creative Labs – Treffpunkte für Kreative?

“…Zudem konzentrieren sich sämtliche unternehmerische Funktionen (Fachexpertise, administrative Aufgaben, Unternehmensstrategie, Marketing) auf immer weniger Individuen. Parallel zu dieser Entwicklung beobachten wir seit etwa 15 Jahren eine zunehmende Zahl an geteilten Arbeitsumgebungen (Schmidt 2019) wie Coworking Spaces oder Makerspaces, deren steigende Nachfrage vor dem Hintergrund der oben skizzierten Entwicklungen erklärt werden kann (Brown 2017;Merkel 2019;Blagoev et al 2019).…”

Governance entrepreneurship in regional economic development: individual agency in Austria

“…It presents novel results from an empirical analysis conducted in two towns in Austria that have been challenged by demographic and economic peripheralization processes. The case study focuses on the implementation of creative hubs, which function as spatial settings for working and innovation in the towns, involving a range of heterogeneous actors (Schmidt, 2019). These hubs can serve as fruitful catalysts for establishing new partnerships between firms, strengthening networking practices and developing entrepreneurial activities in peripheral regions (Fuzi, 2015).…”