From http://blogs.worldbank.org:  BY VICTOR MULAS ON MON, 11/17/2014

”Categorizing the collaboration and community promotion spaces that make urban innovation ecosystems tick

A variety of collaboration spaces are spreading across urban innovation ecosystems. This makes sense intuitively, because collaboration spaces create and — in some cases — manage and sustain the communities that make the ecosystem exist and grow.

I believe that collaboration spaces are, in fact, one of the key elements to create and grow urban innovation ecosystems in cities. Our current research in mapping urban innovation is starting to provide results that seem to validate this hypothesis. We are seeing that collaboration spaces that create and manage communities are critical nodes of city urban innovation ecosystems.

We will share more results about this analysis in future blogs but given the relevance of these spaces, I summarized what I believe are the most relevant categories of collaboration spaces. This list, which I prepared for a paper I am working on, is not prescriptive and it is not closed by any means. To the contrary, it just presents a starting point and I welcome comments to expand and refine these categories.”

Tentative categories by Victor Mulas:

Co-working spaces

Examples: WeWork, New York (https://www.wework.com); Impact Hub, London and other locations (http://www.impacthub.net);  Alt City, Beirut (http://www.altcity.me)

Accelerators 

Examples: Tech Stars, Boulder, New York, and other locations (http://www.techstars.com); Seedcamp, London and other locations (http://seedcamp.com)

Maker spaces

Examples: Santiago Maker Space, Santiago de Chile (http://www.stgomakerspace.com); Maker Space, Madrid (http://makespacemadrid.org); GearBox, Nairobi (http://gearbox.co.ke)

Fabrication labs (Fablabs)

Examples: Fab Lab Barcelona (http://www.fablabbcn.org); Fab Lab Lisboa (http://fablablisboa.pt); Fab Lab South Africa (http://www.fablab.co.za)

Techshop®

Example: Techshop®, multiple locations (http://www.techshop.ws)

Living labs

Examples: Waag Society, Amsterdam (https://waag.org/en); Citilab, Barcelona (http://citilab.eu/en); Living Lab Maputo (http://www.micti.co.mz/micti/index.php)

Urban labs

Examples: Urban Lab, Barcelona (http://www.22barcelona.com/content/view/698/897/lang,en); New Urban Mechanics, Boston (http://www.newurbanmechanics.org/boston

Industry innovation labs

Example: U+I Labs, Chicago (http://www.uilabs.org)

Innovation hub

Examples: NUMA, Paris (http://en.numa.paris); Forum Virium, Helsinki (http://www.forumvirium.fi/en); Ruta N, Medellin (http://rutanmedellin.org); iHub, Nairobi (http://www.impacthub.net)

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