"Success" will come from fewer corny promotional films and more good design
Governments,
chambers of commerce and developers make considerable fuss about stimulating start-up businesses and programmes to promote small enterprise. Much is spent on glossy brochures and little promotional films that show a diverse mix of people congregating in these incubators. You'll be familiar with the images - the clients looking engaged as someone
scribbles on a whiteboard; the young lady in jeans and a scoop neck jumper sipping coffee from a cardboard cup and making swooping motions on a tablet device; the creative/geeky men in particularly bad denim and silly facial hair having a brain-storming session, leaning in over a tiny table and making oooh-ahhhh facial expressions about their collective Eureka moment.
These tableaux have become the canned photo-documentary
short-hand of what happens in incubators - people draw useless diagrams in front of bewildered clients, others sip coffee and check their Facebook accounts and far too many wear dated clothing because they're too busy to concern themselves with
sartorial detail.
As governments and urban planners attempt to figure out how to get people to collaborate by helping to navigate capital to the doorsteps of ideas, slick innovations to clever marketers and hungry customers to tasty products, they're creating unnecessary work for themselves by trying to make things look creative, or cool, or even
funky. What they should be focusing on is creating an air of intimacy and developing spaces that are right for people starting out. Translation: small, neutral, flexible and, of course, affordable. Budding businesses don't need ping-pong tables, skateboard ramps or any of the
contrived West Coast trappings that have morphed into global short-hand for the next big thing.
People involved in running a small enterprise don't need to be treated like children and they don't want their clients to feel like they're visiting a
day-care centre.
Far too much effort is put into trying to engineer an environment when the real requirement is that there should be more small office spaces for two-person legal firms, petite studios for blossoming industrial designers and tiny shops for craftspeople looking to sell their wares. Most importantly, these enclaves need to be located in areas that people want to work in and clients want to visit - not in wind-swept suburbs or derelict neighbourhoods that are decades away from regeneration.
In too many cities the scale of available office and retail space is all wrong. At one end there are developers who are only interested in constructing massive
floor footprints in the hope that a major Indonesian bank will come along and take the whole thing. At the other are small offices and retail units that aren't much better than market stalls.
Some collaborators in Tokyo have been helping to rethink how ideas, capital and clients can come together. In Odaiba (not exactly the most convenient location in Tokyo) the Soho development
features well-proportioned live/work spaces, a bar, restaurant, gym, lounge and roof terrace that serve a mix of businesses all looking for sound design without the silly details.
Across the harbour, a project dubbed Tabloid (it's housed in an old newspaper printing plant), is a bit more rough and ready and is firmly geared at the graphic design and budding ad agency market. On the ground floor is an excellent little restaurant engineered to meet the tastes of the tenants and there's a wonderful roof terrace made for sunbathing,
impromptu meetings and evening cocktail parties.
Good ideas and capital come together when people are at ease and not stressed about where they can grab lunch or how they're going to get home. They don't want to be stuck in the middle of nowhere, they don't want to pay extra for unnecessary design and they certainly don't want to be marketed as if they were infants. As for incubators, they're best left in research laboratories.
Tyler Brûlé is editor-in-chief of Monocle magazine
