Alongside owning and operating IKEA's stores across the world, Ingka group creates shopping centres where each site is anchored by an IKEA store. So far, they’ve established 44 experience-oriented shopping centres across Europe and China with more on the way.
As part of this expansion into other uses for their space, they've created their first mixed-use meeting place. An easily accessible and flexible community workplaces where local entrepreneurship and business are linked together to develop and grow. The goal of these new spaces is to offer an alternative to working from home or commuting to the office and thus simplify everyday life and create a better balance between work and leisure.
IKEA and their brand Ingka noticed an opening in the market for delivering co-working spaces that were both closer to the homes of those who worked in them, and that also made the best use of vacant space in shopping centres. In order to prove that this new concept could work, they settled on developing a new brand 'Hej!Workshop’ with their first pilot site being located in Stockholm.
The biggest challenge, however, was that Ikea and Ingka had no experience in deploying one co-working space, let alone potentially hundreds. They needed reliable, stable technology that could scale with them across multiple expansion sites.
With Ingka’s desire to create a tech first space without need for heavy personnel presence, they needed technology that not only had a clean, slick user experience but that had the reliability people need in office space. NCG worked with them to provide a complete technology stack that included full wifi connectivity, a bespoke Nexudus platform deployment with mobile app, integrated access control and Audiovisual tech for meeting room booking.
We were chosen as their tech partner specially because of our growth mentality, our flexible approach to system building and the open nature of our platforms. This meant that Ingka could be assured that we focused on the smaller sites the way we would for larger ones, we can integrate any new technologies that might become available in the future and that the system we provided to them could grow and adapt to them rather than stagnate like a closed ecosystem.
With Flexible office space representing a very small part of the Ingka/IKEA brand - they wanted a technology partner who could help guide them in the right technology direction. With the successful launch of their first site, Ingka and Ikea are now looking to launch 2 more sites by the end of the year.
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