Creating space for knowledge economy

Companies and universities of the future will need to radically reshape their work spaces to survive and thrive, according to a leading business academic.

The keys to this reformation are to be found in unlikely places - the coffee machine and the garden shed.

Clive Holtham, professor of management information at City University, told an audience of business information management specialists, academics and IT professionals last week that there was a need for a whole-hearted response to the emerging new economies underpinning business and learning.

Professor Holtham said that the modern office was usually built like a factory. Rules governing mechanical processes have been applied to moving paper around.

"Too much attention has been placed on designing spaces for information work and not enough on designing spaces for the special needs of knowledge work," he said.

Professor Holtham challenged the notion that a knowledge economy will be largely virtual and de-materialised. He argued that the more people use virtual methods, the more they need human-centred methods.

Professor Holtham identified four essential spaces needed in knowledge-economy organisations: the war room, innovation spaces, third spaces and learning spaces.

The war room provides a focal point for communication, shared presentation, decision focus, crisis management and project management. But successful organisations also need informal spaces where the seeds of creative thinking can take root.

The purpose of third spaces is to address this need. Third spaces are the areas where the office community "hangs out", like round the coffee machine. Here, workers can exchange information, share knowledge and create new knowledge.

Professor Holtham pointed to the new British Airways headquarters as an example of creative use of business space, with its restaurant acting as a focus for small business meetings and a cobbled street providing a perfect environment for unplanned creative encounters.

Such areas, often dismissed on cost grounds in planning stages, are an essential part of the successful management of business information, according to Professor Holtham. These spaces will allow people to think and create in ways that best suit their personal preferences.

The lecture drew heavily on issues identified in the planning of City University's Pounds 50 million business school, due to be completed in 2002. Professor Holtham hopes the school will provide a model for business environments. Learning spaces, he said, would challenge the dominant Victorian education model of information transmission that itself usurped medieval peer-to-peer learning.

"The office of the future will be more like the university of the future, where the factory approach to management of learning is replaced by diverse creative spaces," he said.

Professor Holtham's most recent work on the office of the future has been carried out in collaboration with Victoria Ward, director of Sparknow Consultancy and formerly chief knowledge officer of NatWest Markets. Her "scriptorium", a model for future knowledge spaces, is a garden shed that has been transformed into a challenging space for knowledge sharing and creation.