TOOLS AND KNOWLEDGE SHARING

BILBAO

First international training

October, 9th-11th 2019, project partners visited Arrasate and Bilbao for the first training and the following management meeting in the Basque Country, Spain.
During the first day, partners visited Otalora in Arrasate (Mondragón) where they had an exchange to get to know the cooperative experience of Mondragon Corporation. The opening speech of the representative of Mondragon Corporation has been a great base for discussion about cooperative values & principles and their links with coworking spaces.
During the next two days, participants were hosted in BBF, business hub but also University campus of Mondragon. The hosts of the meeting prepared a guided tour into the “world” of MTA (Mondragon Team Academy), an entrepreneurship programme thought in an academic coworking space at the University of Mondragon. The tour served as an inspiration before getting into the main training activities planned by the partners.
The meeting in Bilbao encouraged participants to engage in dynamic training sessions accompanied by design thinking methodology. The main objective was to discover, define, ideate and prototype a future coworking space. All partners had to apply futuristic mindset on the basis of trends, experiences, expertise and dialogs between each other and with invited external participants. The creative sessions led to some valuable conclusions of core elements that in opinion of all partners are important in innovative coworking spaces. The conclusions have been used for the mapping research and further report towards (academic) coworking spaces.