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We call work environments other than a central corporate facility or a home office "Third Places." Our research indicates that as many as 20 million people worldwide are already using third places for part of their work weeks today, and that many individuals will be spending as much as 25 - 35% of their total "worktime" in these new kinds of locations.

Common locations like coffee shops, public libraries, and even a borrowed office are evolving into very different environments. We began tracking these new work patterns formally in early 2003, but we have seen the emergence of only a few exemplar instances of well-designed third-place work environments so far.

We believe it will take another year or so of experimentation before the industry begins to converge on an effective business model. Many important questions remain to be answered:

• What kinds of facilities, amenities, and community activites will be attractive to workclub members?
• What professional and administrative support services will members want and pay for?
• Where within regional areas should shared work centers be located?
• What is the market-based business case for these locations?
• How can the "social service" component of a work centers be monetized?
• What types of talent development and training programs will be necessary?
• What is the business case for corporations that use these kinds of facilities for mobile or remote workers?

We are actively exploring these and other similar questions as we move beyond our recent work on the WIRED West Michigan project (funded by the Department of Labor) that focused specifically on how shared remote work centers (what we call Business Community Centers^TM) help a region attract and retain talented "location-neutral" workers.

We expect to see many third places developing in rural environments (connecting talent to metropolitan areas), as well as edge-city versions in the outer suburbs of larger metropolitan areas. But the universal principles will remain the same:

• Access to tools, knowledge, support services, and other people
• Flexible workplace infrastructure
• Multiple space use for work, learning, and civic activity

Our efforts going forward will leverage what we are learning in these early experiments and add new knowledge we are gaining from the product development world. We are particularly interested in how third places can serve as engines of social capital development.

Indeed, the most exciting prospect we are investigating currently is the use of third places as "anchor" locations for economic development in our increasingly global, knowledge-based economy.

If you are interested in a detailed briefing on our current state of knowledge, who the market leaders will be, and how this work option could fit into an overall workplace strategy, please contact Charlie Grantham or Jim Ware.

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Photo provided by Laurie Aznavoorian of Callison Architects