Sustainable-development measurement of china’s coworking industry using social-network analysis method

Abstract

While China’s sharing economy slows down and enters a period of structural adjustment, the coworking industry is a new force. Moreover, after China had issued important policies to support the comprehensive upgrading and the sustainable development of mass entrepreneurship and mass innovation in September 2018, the development potential of the coworking industry became even greater. However, the coworking industry also faces many development bottlenecks, such as the homogeneity of services and the single-profit model. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to realize the sustainable development of the coworking industry to facilitate mass entrepreneurship and innovation in China. The coworking industry is both a subindustry of sharing economy and a branch of the Internet industry, with the significant characteristic of networking. Therefore, we used social-network analysis (SNA) to build a three-level index system of China’s coworking industry: the density-comprehensive index at the macrolevel, the subgroup comprehensive index at the mesolevel, and the centrality-comprehensive index at the microlevel, so as to scientifically measure the development status of the coworking industry. In addition, the comprehensive index system was applied to a comparative study of the six models that were formed in actual development. Analytical results indicate that China coworking industry formed a good network with rich ecological diversity. Different from other countries, China’s coworking industry has embodied a profound gene of entrepreneurship and innovation since its early stage of development. Internet giant enterprises Alibaba, Tencent, and Baidu are playing an important role in the development of China’s coworking industry, and all have strategic layouts among several models.