Ikea just opened the doors to its newest piece of property in Copenhagn’s hip and fast-changing meatpacking neighborhood.
Well, sort of. You can’t just stroll in and buy a Billy shelving unit at Space10, which doesn’t have what Göran Nilsson, manager of concept innovation for Inter Ikea Systems B.V., calls “the corporate expectations, with the blue and yellow entrance.” This is Ikea’s innovation lab, where the company hopes it can cook up its Next Big Idea. It officially opened last week, and is being run by the locally-based Rebel Agency.
Space10 is housed in a revamped fishery and will operate a bit like a French salon, with a rotating cast of professors, students, designers, artists, producers, and generally interesting people flowing in and out for workshops and exhibits. As groups come in, they’ll brainstorm and create projects that touch on predetermined themes, like what Nilsson calls the “circular economy.” For instance, when Space10 asked students from the Copenhagen Institute of Interactive Design to consider this kind of cradle-to-cradle style of living, they came up with a tabletop that can take heat from hot mugs of coffee, or computers, and convert it into energy, to recharge devices. “If that had happened elsewhere in Ikea it would have taken a year,” Nilsson says. “But these students came up with it in two weeks.”
That’s exactly the type of supercharged creative thinking that Inter Ikea Systems B.V., which owns the Ikea concept and franchise, hopes to get out of Space10. “It’s not a factory that should always produce something,” Nilsson says. “It’s development of a concept, not development of a product.”
