I created a business model canvas that combines the notions brought forth by my business research.
My senior thesis, at its core, is an inquiry into the way people work together. More and more, it seems as if the industrial-era 9-5 workday is quickly becoming a thing of the past, pushed forth by the widespread adoption of remote work and radical shifts in technology, infrastructure, and expectation. What does a working lifestyle look like going forward? Can the very notion of work – where millions of people spend the biggest percentage of their life – become more flexible? And what kind of infrastructure is going to be needed to accommodate these changes?
For my business conjecture, I’ve combined three considerations: work tourism, adaptive reuse of architecture, and social enterprise. Work tourism, or digital nomad-ism, is a reality afforded by widespread adoption of remote work where workers are not bound to a desk and can work with communities in different cultures and environments. Adaptive reuse is the responsible re-purposing of historic buildings and architecture to sustainably “recycle” existing infrastructure while preserving important cultural landmarks within a community. Finally, social enterprise is the developing notion that companies – even for-profit ones – can and should responsibly do good.
In this business model canvas, these are combined into co-operative adaptive-reuse coworking spaces. Every one of the stakeholders – coworkers who subscribe to work within a global network of these spaces, small and large companies that pay to rent desks, nonprofits that have discounted access to these resources, and community partners that cater to local interests with a public-facing revenue stream – has say in how each space operates. A major premise is to connect local communities, along with their traditions, cultures, and organizations, with global professional communities, like work tourists and larger decentralized companies in order to work alongside each other and transact ideas and human empathy.
