What we brought home from Coworking Europe in Paris

Last week our CEO Linn Vorkinn and founder Nils-Henrik Stokke travelled to Paris for Coworking Europe, the largest international conference for the coworking and flexible workspace industry. More than 500 operators, landlords, investors and suppliers from across Europe and beyond met at the Pullman Paris Montparnasse on 5 and 6 November, and the day before was set aside for visiting the city's own spaces.

Two days of talks and panels

The programme ran from managed offices and management agreements to AI in daily operations, virtual offices, profitability and the question every independent operator asks sooner or later: can small beat scale? A few things stayed with us:

Managed offices were the talk of the conference. Ubiq's figures showed flex at around six per cent of the Paris office stock, yet already equal to almost a third of traditional office take-up.
Community is still the hardest part of the business, and the part that makes people stay. People come for the space, as one speaker put it, but they stay for the experience.
Independent operators win by being rooted where they are, not by copying the big chains. As Cecilia Berglund of Gruts Work put it, small doesn't beat scale by trying to become scale.
From Kyiv, Christine Seryozhechkina of Kooperativ showed what a coworking space can be in wartime: a shelter and an engine for local business at the same time. When the lights go out, people become the power.

A conference slide reading: People don't come for desks. They come for each other. — People don't come for desks. They come for each other. From Kooperativ's talk on day one.

AI got plenty of stage time too, mostly with a healthy dose of scepticism: build slowly, and keep people at the centre.

Paris, space by space

Just as valuable as the talks were the visits. We spent our time in Paris going from space to space, from Hej!, a coworking space made together with IKEA and furnished entirely with its furniture, to the colourful lounges at WOJO, seeing how others solve design, hospitality, food and community in practice, and talking to the people who run them. We came home with a notebook full of ideas, and a few of them will find their way to Stavanger and Sandnes.

Two Paris coworking spaces: a lounge at Hej! and a colourful lounge at WOJO — Hej!, furnished 100 per cent by IKEA (left), and WOJO (right).

A small club

Paris was also a reminder of how different Innovation Dock is from most of the industry. For most operators the model is simple: lease a building, fit it out and rent out desks and offices. Only around five per cent of coworking spaces own the premises they run. Innovation Dock is one of them.

Renting out offices is also only about half of our business. The other half is everything that happens between the people in our buildings: Impact Summit & Awards, Impact Million, Investor Sessions with Thommessen, and our work with industry partners such as Equinor and Aker BP to connect startups with customers and capital. The workspace is where our members sit. The network is why they stay.

Part of a bigger journey

Paris was one stop on a longer road. Through the Innovation Dock Startup Exchange Programme, we take Norwegian growth companies abroad and bring international companies to Norway, for results: customers, pilots, partners and investors. That work has taken us to Houston and Aberdeen, and brought startups from the US, the UK and Brazil to ONS in Stavanger.

Every operator we met in Paris is a possible door for that work: a place for a Norwegian company to land in Antwerp, Amsterdam or Munich, and a reason for theirs to come to Stavanger. And the journey continues: next week, Pia Warland and Elianne Strøm Topstad board the plane to Brazil, for Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo.

Thank you

A big thank you to Jean-Yves Huwart, founder of Coworking Europe, and to Robert Faulhaber, Florian Kappes and the whole team behind the conference, who once again brought the European coworking community together.

And thank you to everyone we met in Paris. To Olivier Kegels and Bart Bencivenni of Humgy in Antwerp, Thom Wernke of StartDock, Alexa Lightner of B. Amsterdam, Rosee Shrestha and Amany Mohamed of Cobot, Daniel Moura of Pixforce, Sascha Hartmann, Filip Iwanski, Stefanie Heilmann, Christine Seryozhechkina, Christian Vatter, Katie Baroway, Andrew Troostwijk, Adam Zvada, Yavor Chernaev, Lauryn Brown and the many operators who showed us around their spaces. See you in 2027!

A phone showing a search result for Herbert Grönemeyer — The evidence, as it was presented to us in Paris.

PS: To the large delegation who were convinced that Nils-Henrik is Herbert Grönemeyer's double: Danke schön, but no autographs.

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12 November 2026