Innovation, espaces de co‐working et tiers-lieux : entre conformisme et créativité

A third‐place (Oldenburg, 1991) is a place, most of time urban place, which is not exactly neither an office nor a home. This place is mainly dedicated to individual social capital building and relational asset production. Bars, cafe, airport or any public or private places with WiFI hot spot are third-­‐places. In the line of this seminal definition, a co-­‐ working place is a third-­‐place with some strong specificities dedicated to entrepreneurship and innovation that we would like to address in this paper.These places have emerged mainly in digital cities or cities with a technological or digital industrial sector. One of the raison d’être of this place is above all to help structuring epistemic community as well as give support to market and social innovation. Especially in France, local initiatives of this sort are burgeoning around “Cantine” (Canteen) and “network of Canteens”2 and the main issue of this chapter is to understand how these local initiatives around co-working places can help territory to enhance their market innovative capabilities and its disruptive and collective innovation potential. Having that in mind we suggest that a co-­‐working place can under specific condition reinforce a conformism lead to lock-­‐in situation whereas creativity and disruptive innovation are maximize under very specific structural configuration. Consequently, we suggest some good local public practices.