COWORKING, COLLABORATIVE CAPABILITIES AND UNIVERSITY-SOCIETY COLLABORATION

The modern-day work environment is changing, and one of these changes is the rise of the coworking space. In order to prepare students for the future of work we need to understand the nature of coworking spaces in order to better understand how students' education and training can be tailored to best prepare them for thriving in these new environments. This study explores the way in which industry, start-ups, students, researchers and public bodies reflect and argue regarding their own engagement in a living lab, a type of coworking space. The aim is to better understand the different parties' perspectives of what a coworking space is and how they perceive a living lab should operate. We examine the phenomenon of coworking through the lens of an actor-network theory-based model. This approach unpacks coworking as a concept as it is revealed in interviews with participants from the tourism industry, students, researchers and public bodies who are all involved in a newly established coworking space/living lab in Norway. We use an actor network theory model to examine the concepts, relations and mechanisms that describe a current state discourse of meaning, membership and predictable behavior that shape and are shaped by facts, artifacts and relations, and how disturbances and other factors push the system toward some new future state of discourse. We use text from interviews with various actors involved in the living lab in order to carry out an analysis based on probabilistic topic models that produce networks of words based on the interviews. This is a mathematical model that identifies groups or communities of words that are related and may therefore illustrate the themes in the interviews. These networks are used to characterize the discourses of coworking found in the material. While the mathematical model is objective in its approach, the interpretation of the findings is subjectively interpreted by the authors. We discuss the most popular themes from the interviews (as defined by the probabilistic model) and their potential impact for the future of educating students. In doing so we lay out potential questions for future research on the topic. We provide an online dashboard for further exploration of the material for the reader as the research is ongoing and is currently in an exploratory phase.