Constructing Collaborative Spaces: An Ethnography of Entrepreneurial Place-Making

Entrepreneurship increasingly takes place in new collaborative spaces, such as incubators, science parks, or coworking spaces. Despite the broad consensus on the various benefits that collaborative spaces can have for entrepreneurs, we are only just beginning to understand how entrepreneurs are implicated in the construction of these supportive contexts. In response, we draw on the phenomenological literature on place to create a conceptual vocabulary attentive to how collaborative space and entrepreneurial processes are related. Based on an ethnography of a coworking space in Paris, we identify three types of place-making entrepreneurs engage in to nurture their entrepreneurial journey: (a) projective identity formation, where entrepreneurs use place as a symbolic signifier to give form to their nascent venture and entrepreneurial identity; (b) rudimentary inscriptions, in which entrepreneurs define the purpose of the collaborative space in a deliberately vague manner so as not to limit the range of activities that the place can accommodate, (c) spatial appropriation, in which entrepreneurs re-create, manipulate, and personalize the material arrangement of place according to their specific needs. Our contribution is to show how entrepreneurs – through place-making – construct collaborative spaces both at the level of representation, affect, and materiality, and how this in turn can be generative for entrepreneurship.