Hosting, producing and brokering: How collaborative spaces engage with local innovation ecosystems

In recent years, we have witnessed a proliferation of settings reflecting a culture of collaboration and openness, such as coworking spaces, incubators/accelerators, makerspaces, and creative hubs. Such settings are labeled as “collaborative spaces”, as they are expected to facilitate collaborative relationships both among their users and with external actors, thus favoring creativity and innovation at the individual, organizational, and territorial level. Recent studies recognize that collaborative spaces sustain collaboration among multiple local actors and, thus, favor open and participative innovation processes. However, the question of how collaborative spaces engage with their local innovation ecosystem is still left pending. The present study aims to fill this gap. Drawing on an interpretive review and a qualitative multiple case study, our paper identifies three forms of engagement - i.e., “hosting”, “producing”, and “brokering” - that can be enacted by collaborative spaces through a complex set of specific actions. We suggest that brokering embraces and enables both hosting and producing to activate a “virtuous cycle” that couples inbound and outbound innovation processes, as the hosting of external actors (and externally produced activities) favors the production of activities by and within collaborative spaces, after which these activities are projected outward, and so forth.