In the pursuit of coworking classification, it’s useful to have a visual representation of the sector’s evolution… so we built an evolutionary tree.

The tree shows how the landscape of coworking, serviced offices, managed offices and associated categories evolved from a single ancestor, the built asset.

You can track the progression from bottom to top:

Built assets split into infrastructure, real estate and manufacturing branches.

Real estate splits into commercial real estate (where the coworking product stems from) and residential real estate which is a completely different branch.

Commercial real estate then splits into more branches – hospitality (hotels etc.), industrial (warehouses, data centres etc.), retail (shops, supermarkets etc.) and office space.

Office space splits into two important branches – conventional office space, which is the traditional way of sourcing long-term space (leases, sub-leases etc.) and flexible office space, which incorporates the entire world of serviced offices and managed offices. This world has grown very complex over the last 10 years or so.

The green dotted lines represent associated relationships between key evolutionary segments (retail & hospitality incorporating flex, conventional office space incorporating managed offices etc.)

The question is whether Managed Offices and Full Time serviced offices now contain multiple species.

To borrow from National Geographic: “Speciation occurs when a group within a species separates from other members of its species and develops its own unique characteristics. The demands of a different environment or the characteristics of the members of the new group will differentiate the new species from their ancestors”

In upcoming articles, we will look to construct lists of service provision traits present within the coworking, managed and conventional sectors which, when mapped to individual brands in the space, should allow us to determine if multiple species can be defined.

Then we can name them.