Moboff: how coworking can stimulate entrepreneurship in Japan

Coworking can help entrepreneurs meet likeminded people and, then, give them a hand to grow their business faster. In Japan, the entrepreneurship spirit remain low as compared with other developped country.

DWF, an office design company, has started the Moboff (contraction of mobile-office) project. Five coworking spaces recently opened up in downtown Tokyo (Shibuya).

“Nomad workers and entrepreneurs aren’t looking only for a place to seat. They aim to meet people and join new kind of communties”, says Nicolas Koruni, product manager of Moboff. Our ideal would be to have such coworking places all over Tokyo”.
Moboff spaces, where event are organized on a regular base, are becoming a focal point for a number of topics, related to technology a.o.

“Why Japan, like other developped economies, needs to embrace the economy of creativity”

Hiroshi Okano is professor at the Graduate Business School of Osaka.

He is a specialist of creativity. According to him, Japanese companies have always been good to procuced very nice technological state of the art products. Nevertheless, they integrated too seldom the creativity, design and cultural inputs which give, today more than ever, the value to new items.

Toyota, once the champion of innovation in the world, is now facing a huge crisis due, for a part, for its inability to start from the customer’s taste and cultural sensitivity instead of giving the key of innovation mainly to engineers, who draw very efficient cars but too light in terms of emotional attraction.
Nowadays, however, Japanese cultural productions are becoming very popular all around Asia.

Will the economy of Japan rely more, soon, on cultural soft products than industrials outputs ?

Jeremy Rifkin: “We are more and more connected in our biosphere as we are in the blogosphere”

Media: the rise of “content in the cloud”

“Enterprise 2.0 is shifting from buzz word to reality for a growing number of companies”

Stuart McIntyre is a British consultant, expert in the Enterprise 2.0 concept.

“Enterprise 2.0 is not anymore a buzz word : it is becoming a reality in a growing number of firms, says Stuart McIntyre. Today, collaboration, knowledge sharing practices via new internet tools (a.o. social softwares) are helping companies to improve their productivity and, above all, their innovation capabilities, in their day to day live”.

“However, Enterprise 2.0 is not only a matter of using online social tools, underlines the consultant, who was speaking at Blug 2010, a IBM Lotus conference in Brussels. Enterprise 2.0 needs a cultural shift, new behaviour and the support of the leaders at the top of the organisation. Involve the leaders is critical in order to turn a traditional firm into a true enterprise 2.0. It is a managerial challenge”.

If Enterprise 2.0 can drive innovation up, it won’t erase the R&D department, though.

“Nevertheless, a company should evaluate the cost of not tapping into the ideas of the people working in other departments within the organisation, either be it the marketing, sales, HR or finance units...”

“Enterprise 2.0 is less and less a buzz word, well more and more a reality for companies”