Common properties of Innovation Spaces: Design Thinking and Beyond

Designers,  R&D personnel,  decision makers  are the crucial ingredients  for Science and Technology Parks (STP). They have to be stimulated and supported by their environments. However, designers as well as business decision makers are also under continuous pressure for productization  and money‐ making.  Innovation  spaces  have  therefore  evolved  with  the  businesses,  their  working  habits,  and technological  advances  that  support  creation,  collaboration,  and  corporate  priorities.  Innovation Spaces help   STP   residents   in their   high‐speed,   creative   endeavors   (e.g. rapid   ideation   and prototyping). Innovation spaces are needed for any human activity that promotes creativity. Architecture, interior design, computer graphics are powerful instruments in constructing futuristic innovation spaces [1]. Whether physical or virtual, these spaces are in fact “micro” Areas of Innovation (AoI) buried within Science Parks.  By  careful  analysis  of  these  emerging  spaces  we  hope  to  extract  some  common properties and even find potential “self‐similarity”  rules among micro AoI, Incubation centers, STPs, and  the  regional  “macro”  AoI  in  our  full  paper.  Self‐similarity emerges in nature as  well  as  in distributed, technological human activities such as the Internet formation [2].An innovation  space as a work habitat  combines  efficiency  and flexibility  with aesthetics,  supports    multi‐functional  use  within  the  available  area,  and  enables  communication  between  dynamically formed teams/groups.  STPs are built on the core idea of being useful as collaborative environments; so they exactly need to become the innovation spaces for their end users.In this paper, we investigate current and emerging  innovation  spaces and find common  properties that  drive  innovators  and  engineers  to be productive.  As good practices, we give examples from several Teknopark Istanbul’s resident   offices   of  various   sizes and   from different   technology disciplines. These offices were designed with different functionality in mind, but at the end showed common properties that we attribute to “desire for innovation”.