Coworking and research

October 2, 2008

Bora writes about coworking and telecommuting. I’ve been wondering if coworking will ever catch on in the life sciences and what the models might be. It is one thing to do it as an informatician or software developer, but what about bench scientists. I can think of three models

1. Incubators which allow you to set up a small company and use lab space in a university or other research facility

2. A facility that specializes in a particular kind of research or expertise, e.g. you could have facilities that specialize in providing consumables and supporting infrastructure for Affymetrix arrays. You could then outsource other kinds of experiments and focus on your expertise, perhaps with a specific plan in mind (this is just one thought). You essentially reserve time on the instruments, and use the reagents and consumables and pay for what you use (or perhaps order your own and just pay for instrument time)

3. You could completely virtualize your research, outsourcing everything and just focusing on data analysis and experiment design. Can the Assay Depot model could be extended even further to support something like this?

Just some random thoughts. Would love to hear what others think