City and university officials gathered Friday with community members at Burton Barr Central Library to celebrate the opening of the Hive @ Central, an entrepreneurial coworking space and partnership between the city of Phoenix and ASU.
The Hive is the third entrepreneurial space in the ASU Alexandria Co-working Network, which is a group of locations designed to encourage entrepreneurship and innovation. What’s unique about the Alexandria Network is that each coworking space is located in a library.
ASU Senior Vice President Sethuraman Panchanathan said the Alexandria Network wanted to provide people with a place to translate their ideas into real projects.
“Libraries are a place of knowledge, a place of connectivity, a place that provides access, a place where you can share information and transact information,” Panchanathan said. “(We wanted to) not only take those ideas and information and all the transactions that happen, but make good with it in a very tangible way.”
The Hive fills about 2,500 square feet of Burton Barr’s second floor. The space will offer access to technology resources — such as computers and Wi-Fi — as well as human resources, including trained library staff and mentors.
Panchanathan said the Hive will take advantage of its proximity to the ASU Downtown campus, a place he said has many students and faculty who are “already entrepreneurial in their thinking,” but will still incorporate all of ASU’s colleges and schools.
Mayor Greg Stanton said one of Phoenix’s strengths is that it has more entrepreneurs per capita than any other city in the country.
However, Stanton said in order to harness that potential for innovation, the city has to embrace its budding entrepreneurial climate.
“We have to build a more diverse, sustainable, long-term economy based upon new ideas, new people, new energy so we can compete in this increasingly competitive international economy, which means we need the best ideas coming forward,” Stanton said. “Those are the ideas of the future that are going to build the jobs of the future, that are going to be created right here at the Hive in the heart of the city.”
City Councilman Daniel Valenzuela added that Phoenix needs to increase its concentration of entrepreneurs and attract more capital in order to further support its economy.
“Hive @ Central advances us on this path toward establishing an ecosystem that supports entrepreneurship and innovation by providing the physical and intellectual space to explore ideas,” Valenzuela said.
Although its design was based on that of other coworking spaces and entrepreneurial incubators in central Phoenix, such as Co+Hoots and Seed Spot, the Hive is unique because of the direct partnership with ASU and the “academic firepower” that relationship brings, Stanton said.
“A great city, a city that’s advancing, needs as many coworking spaces as possible,” Stanton said. “The whole idea of coworking is to bring incredibly bright, creative people together and let the ideas collide.”
The Alexandria Co-working Network is named after the library in Alexandria, Egypt, that was established in the third century B.C. The library at Alexandria was representative of society’s first coworking spaces, offering not only books and access to written knowledge but also collaboration and a platform for the discussion of ideas.
The first two coworking spaces in the Alexandria Network — Eureka Loft at the Scottsdale Civic Center Library and ThinkSpot at the Mesa Public Library Red Mountain branch — opened in 2013. The program plans to continue opening coworking spaces in other libraries around the Valley.
Contact the reporter at kimberly.koerth@asu.edu
