"More than just Space"

Abstract

This paper aims to understand interactions at creative hubs, and how this understanding can be used to inform the design of virtual creative hubs Ð i.e., social-technical infrastructures that support hub-like interactions amongst people who arenÕt spatially or temporally co-located. We present findings from a qualitative field study in UK creative hubs, in which we conducted seventeen observations and ten interviews in three sites. Our findings reveal a range of key themes that define interactions within creative hubs: smallness of teams; neutrality of the hubs; value of the infrastructure; activities and events; experience sharing; and community values and rules. These interactions together form a network and elements that influence one another to make a creative hub more than just physical space. We employ the concept of Assemblage introduced by Deleuze and Guattari to explore this network of interactions and, in doing so, reveal implications for the design of virtual creative hubs that seek to replicate them.

Virtual Hubs

“…The information provided on the hubs' websites suggested that their existence and coniguration was driven by the provision of three key processual qualities, which have previously been noted as valuable traits of traditional creative hubs [17]. These were social capital, knowledge exchange, and incubation.…”

“…Our previous work has hypothesized that it might be these non-functional aspects of hubs that are most likely to be degraded when moving over to a virtual platform [17]. For this reason, we argue that the lack of attention as yet paid to them in the study of virtual hubs in the literature is a critical knowledge gap, which could signiicantly hinder future efforts to improve existing, and develop new, socio-technical platforms for business incubation and acceleration.…”

“…For example, previous studies of traditional, physical incubators report the important value of the social capital gained through participation to entrepreneurs, especially in the technology sector [2,15,22] Ð and, in particular, the role that such spaces play in establishing trust, norms, identiication, obligations, and expectations in relationships between tenants [27]. Additionally, our own previous work has shown how the value gained from hubs by their members stems from how these spaces support and nourish the development of individual and business relationships via subtle aspects of their physical, social and operational coniguration, which include: the size of teams; the development and, sometimes, enforcement of community ethos, values and rules; infrastructure design; and shared participation in social and business activities and events [17].…”

“…We began the irst stage of our study by compiling a list of 203 candidate virtual creative hubs from diferent sources, including: 41 incubators from Open ℧ovement [24]; 55 creative hubs found by searching the European Creative Hub Network with the keywords 'digital', 'incubation' [10]; 80 virtual incubators and accelerators from Ideagist [25]; 11 virtual incubators and accelerators from a NESTA UK dataset [4]; and 16 from a list developed in our previous research [17]. Next, we included or excluded each candidate from our sample based on information available on each hub's public website.…”

“…This means that participants must often at least move oice, if not city or country, to gain the beneits of participation. As such hubs are often found in capital cities or other major population centers, this requirement may extenuate uneven concentration of work, talent and wealth across countries Ð and, as a result, cause ªcultural homogenization and a lack of regional cultural inluence on products of hubsº [17] Ð or simply act as a barrier to entry to those who are not easily able to move their business. However, by adopting a virtual model of incubation, such platforms also risk undermining the social and relational aspects that have been shown to contribute strongly to the value of the in-person hub experience [17].…”