THE INSIDE

For businesses strategizing office space and new workstyles during the pandemic, it seems like a constant dance of two steps forward, one step back. With trust comes responsibility, and business must embrace that responsibility by leading with clarity, conviction – and technology.

CEO of InnerSpace, James Wu, writes about his office space analytics predictions as we move into 2022. Read more to see James touch upon long-term workplace transformation, people's behaviors in spaces and tech filling productivity gaps.

Even if your return to work strategy is still in flux ensure they’re ready when the moment comes, savvy occupancy planners are leveraging data to build the best possible plan. Here’s our checklist for what’s a must when it comes to your physical space.

We spoke with Matthew Savino, managing partner of SHRP Limited and the co-founder of HRLive about the top concerns and considerations he’s hearing from clients as they consider the HR implications of hybrid work models. 

InnerSpace, a space utilization and analytics platform that provides location intelligence for enterprise companies, has successfully completed the System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2 Type I audit.

Dwell time is key to understanding how long employees stay in a space, and for what purpose. The insights it generates can promote both employee comfort levels and the efficient use of space in a workplace.

People want to return to the office, but not all the time. Most want to keep the freedom of remote work, yet infuse it with the in-person collaboration, meetings and social interactions that offices bring.

Equipped with the right data, it’s then possible to discern the ideal employee:desk ratio for each department’s unique needs, helping companies grow as occupancy and utilization of their office space changes over time.

The office must serve a purpose. Employees now seek the flexibility to commute to offices on specific days for specific purposes. A wide range of specific needs has to be addressed for each employee, and each department. 

The rise of hybrid workstyles is here. With it comes key questions about how an office can best support employees and adjust to the future of work.

This metric is a key part of how indoor location technology paints a dynamic picture of how space, and the resources within it, are actually used. In fact, the popular pathway metric can be seen in our dashboard as a data visualization, illustrating movements of any employee groups a company wants to filter.

October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. We revisit this critical subject by focusing specifically on the use of WiFi. WiFi is also an important instrument in the data privacy toolbox. That’s because this technology remains the best-case solution when it comes to balancing both privacy and efficiency.

In one particular study, our teams installed the InnerSpace platform in the main office of a global leader in lodging and hospitality. The goal was to understand the behavior patterns of two distinct teams of employees in a space. The client wanted to design the space efficiently, putting resources where they were needed most. 

September typically marks many things – the end of summer, a return to school, the resumption of routine. Yet, amidst an ongoing pandemic, it also marks another important milestone: getting back to some semblance of normalcy.  The rising concerns over the Delta variant, however, have placed a cloud of concern over how to safely facilitate the return “back” to all of what we used to know.

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to disrupt future planning, especially when it comes to reopening offices and welcoming workers back into workplaces. Yet it isn’t enough to simply focus on the goal of opening the doors alone. 

So you’re looking to design a flexible space to suit a hybrid workforce model. But where to begin? Adapting the design of a space to suit your needs isn’t a one-time, all-or-nothing endeavour. As needs change, workplaces can evolve. For now though, we need a starting point for getting employees back into the building after a very long hiatus for many.

For employees, the emotional fallout from COVID’s impact and uncertainty has taken a major toll on their mental health – and it’s important that companies keep this in mind as they welcome their cohorts back. For guidance, many companies have sought the expertise of organizations that build and design plans for offices

Among the many hot button issues for companies leasing office space is rationalizing their real estate portfolio. It was a big ticket item before the pandemic, and it remains so today, in the thick of return-to-work planning.

We all look forward to a time when we don’t have to speak of the “C” word. As for today, as COVID-19 dictates how economies open and employees reunite in person, we pause to take the temperature around the world of business.

We’ve written previously about the importance of measuring density, and moving beyond occupancy data alone. Now we’re taking a deeper dive into frequency – which extends past counting how many people are in an office or zone, and seeing where they go, to distinguishing between who are first-time and repeat visitors. 

Offices are in some stage of reopening all over the world as companies welcome employees and clients back in the ways that work best for them. We’ve formulated the top-5 questions we think are most urgent for companies determining how a return-to-the-workplace plan is best deployed. 

As the return to the workplace sets up to be flex-first for most companies, assigned seating will give away to the need for hot-desking, hoteling, and neighborhood arrangements. With any strategy, the ability for employees to find and reserve a desk is key to productivity and a frictionless experience. 

As the return-to-the-workplace picks up steam, with companies plotting when and how to restart physical operations, we can see that flexible work is here to stay. Nine-to-five is a distant memory. Hybrid models, with employees commuting into the office on specific days for specific purposes only, are quickly becoming a popular return to work strategy for many large organizations.

In the new office paradigm, understanding and leveraging the data you need to maintain a safe office environment is critical. That’s where the importance of density is paramount – but not just in terms of the number of people in an overall space.

Companies face the challenge not only of reopening offices, but restructuring them to suit how they expect teams will want to use them. But how can they prepare when there are more questions than answers?  To understand how people use the office, we conducted a study for one of our clients that looked at two different teams.

This new office paradigm demands a thoughtful approach. It is imperative for business owners to consider their commercial real estate space: how it’s used, maintained, and the experience of those working inside it. All answers are ultimately rooted in data. 

What’s your strategy to return to the office? If you’re like most of our clients, you’re likely most focused on the short term goal of simply getting people back to the office. Longer-term decision-making seems like a luxury and yet you’re probably also tasked with rationalizing your portfolio while stepping forward as a workplace transformation leader.

Now more than ever, we all want to visit grocery stores and other essential businesses when they’re not crowded. Before the pandemic, this information helped us to save time and avoid lines.  Now, knowing how busy a place is adds an extra layer of safety and comfort.

Our CEO James Wu shared the stage with an expert panel at the latest Realcomm webinar focused on workplace analytics for the future of work and the hybrid office. It was a timely discussion on how building owners and operators can go beyond occupancy data to facilitate a truly flexible workplace focused on density, efficiency and experience. In case you missed it, here are the highlights.

So what happens when the physical nature of your office, the people in it, and legal policy collide? A new requirement of workplace and facilities teams emerges - corporate compliance data and reporting.

Outdoors, when walking, driving or cycling, apps have replaced paper maps when it comes to figuring out where we are in relation to where we are going. GPS technology is omnipresent – except when it comes to the indoors. In offices, malls, museums and airports, it doesn’t work.  In the past 10 years, indoor location technologies have emerged to tackle this problem.

As companies look to return to the office, flexibility will be a primary focus that transforms meeting spaces. Collaboration, as we recently wrote, will be why offices remain essential to businesses, and the primary driver of why employees visit the workplace. Now as we rethink the role the office plays, meeting spaces will need to evolve to support collaboration, socialization and creativity.

Summer 2005: the San Francisco Coworking Space opens. Two years later, “coworking” appears as a Wikipedia entry, and 75 coworking spaces materialize around the world (according to this timeline). By the time the calendar flipped to 2012, that number had ballooned to more than 2,000.

There’s no question that real estate in cities around the world is, well, expensive. Of all the line items impacting a business, real estate is one of the most pressing – and one over which companies often have the least amount of control.  

The office isn’t dead. The office as we knew it, is. For many of you this statement comes as no surprise. While we’ve proven that working from home is doable, many have recognized that this dramatic shift was not without its negatives.

Business leaders have the opportunity to embark on a thoughtful pivot to create flexible spaces that will boost productivity, ensure safety, and serve the needs of employees. But how? Indoor location data.

Data captured by our leading WiFi-based indoor location platform enables companies to take advantage of their two greatest resources: people and property. The InnerSpace People Overview in our inTELLO analytics dashboard includes three key metrics.

As the future of work evolves, so too does the role the office will play and this raises questions critical to its evolution: How much office space is needed? How should it be designed? What is the purpose of the office? How can it help improve culture, communication and productivity? How will it serve my company’s growth?

We’ve previously explored why an all-or-nothing work-from-home strategy isn’t realistic for the future of work. The reasons are many: employees are fatigued, boundaries around work hours are blurred, culture is suffering, and productivity has taken a hit. Still, the reality is that COVID-19 will need to be managed well into 2022.

InnerSpace predicts 2021 tech trends for how the office will transform this year including the critical role of workplace experience managers and fully interconnected office buildings

Changing information. Indecisive governments. Unclear direction. While our modern lifestyle thrives on instant knowledge, it is taking a long time to understand how this new coronavirus threatens the way we live and work – even for those who are best equipped to give the answers.

The honeymoon phase of working from home is officially over. And despite misleading headlines touting that most companies will move to permanent virtual operations, the reality is that we’ve learned something during this pandemic. The office is a desired destination that provides opportunities for greater team cohesion, collaboration, social connection - and yes, even actual work.

The pandemic has changed how we've worked for the foreseeable future. Companies are determining how, when and why they'll return to their office space. 

We’re now six months into a global pandemic. Spring lockdowns gave way to gradual reopenings, and now the threat of closures loom large again as case numbers in many regions creep upwards. For retail owners, office managers, and campus administrators who are trying to keep people safe and their doors open, there’s never been a more critical time to manage how many people are in a space. Enter: occupancy data.

It’s not long since “digital transformation” first became a business buzzword. In the 90s and 00s, the concept spoke to the opportunity to digitize an organization, to shift from manual input, to bring a business online, to deploy the latest e-solutions.

Just as society is opening back up in stages, InnerSpace believes the workforce will follow a phased approach too

Keep your employees safe and healthy while maintaining business continuity and public health compliance. Choose the only always-on, WiFi based solution that puts your employees’ privacy first.

Whether an office has already re-opened, is planning to re-open, or never fully closed during the COVID-19 crisis, each business shares two common goals: 1) keep employees and visitors safe; 2) keep the doors open. 

InnerSpace, the world’s most accurate WiFi-based indoor location intelligence platform, announces WiFi based contact tracing solutions InnerSpace inTRACK.

COVID-19 has thrust health-care workers to the front lines, caused personal tragedy, and redefined what jobs are “essential.” Economically it has imperiled industries, triggered layoffs, and all-but-stopped life within office complexes, malls, stadiums, and urban hubs. 

A popular question as we think about going back to the office is: how will I know if someone I work with has been infected? For a CEO, the question becomes: how do I avoid shutting down my business should one of my employees become ill?

This is the final article in a three-part series exploring what lays on the other side of COVID-19 for businesses.

Three-part series. Companies retuning to the office after Covid-19. Part 1: https://blog.innerspace.io/helping-businesses-come-out-the-other-side-of-covid-19

In cities across America, office towers are vacant. Museums are empty. Sports are cancelled. Live events postponed. Many of us, the ones who can, have put outdoor adventures and office life on hold to help stop the spread of an extremely contagious virus. The escalating health and economic consequences of COVID-19 are ones we will talk about for a very long time.

InnerSpace, the world’s most accurate WiFi-based indoor location intelligence platform, announces it will provide its platform free-of-charge to retailers during the COVID-19 pandemic.

We take a look at the data to see how businesses responded to the wave of news that initiated from China in December 2019 and quickly swept the world.

InnerSpace, the world’s most accurate WiFi-based indoor location intelligence platform, today announced its product capabilities to support all levels of government to analyze the patterns and movement in public spaces using existing WiFi networks.

InnerSpace promotes Cerys Goodall to the role of President & COO. Goodall will support investment strategies for the company while overseeing sales and marketing, client delivery, professional services and data science programs.

Much has changed in the world since we last wrote about innovation and privacy. Thanks to COVID-19, businesses are in survival mode, governments are confronting unprecedented scenarios – and decisions that once took months to negotiate are now being executed in just days.

InnerSpace has been awarded a patent by the US Patent Office for its approach to generating maps for indoor navigation. The patent (#10458798B2) “Method for Sensing Interior Spaces to Auto-Generate a Navigational Map” protects the company’s unique approach leveraging LiDAR to create maps of indoor spaces.

We have arrived at age the of the Smart Building – where we advance far beyond LEED certification technologies to a world of unprecedented operational efficiencies. By 2024, the smart building market is expected to approach USD $106 billion.  And there is a humble technology making much of this – and much, much more, possible: WiFi.

The new rollercoaster. A book signing. The emergency department. The latest Johnny Cupcakes t-shirt release. People are willing to wait for certain experiences, products or services. And then there are lineups that are deemed simply not worth it. For most businesses, what they offer often sits in the latter camp. People don’t like to wait!

Gartner recently published two reports on the Indoor Location market. Its coveted Magic Quadrant for Indoor Location Services, and the Market Guide for Indoor Location Application Platform both include InnerSpace. Find out more.

It’s time we all have a heart-to-heart conversation about meeting rooms. No, really. They are the piece of working in an office that never quite fits the puzzle, the headache that never quite subsides, the element whose coordination always takes longer than it should.

Last fall, the world’s largest coffee chain opened a new concept store in Manhattan. At “Starbucks Pickup”, customers must use the app in advance to order and simply pick up their beverage. A second such grab-and-go model just opened here in InnerSpace’s home city of Toronto.

In the lead-up to a big game or high-profile concert, city stadiums can see an influx of tens of thousands of people, often arriving en masse. For fans, picking the “wrong line” isn’t cut and dry and, as we all know, wait times have a direct link, whether positive or negative, to the fan experience.

Work life in an office is slowly slipping away from what was once the norm not long ago: 9-5 hours in the office, a couple of mandatory breaks, and a sea of desks adorned with personal effects, drawers of snacks and spare shoes underneath.

InnerSpace has been awarded a patent by the US Patent Office for its approach to generating maps for indoor navigation. The patent (#10458798B2) “Method for Sensing Interior Spaces to Auto-Generate a Navigational Map” protects the company’s unique approach leveraging LiDAR to create maps of indoor spaces.

InnerSpace outfitted one such multinational coffee franchise with our indoor spatial intelligence platform. By studying customer traffic patterns, we wanted to uncover opportunities to improve operations and boost revenue by making data-driven adjustments.

Toronto, Canada - December 10, 2019 - InnerSpace, an IoT-based indoor location intelligence platform for Smart Buildings, today announced it was selected to support the Center for Innovative Technology’s (CIT) active shooter training exercise held on November 18, 2019 at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. The exercises were part of the Smart City Initiative funded by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

In the age of innovation, with our increasingly sophisticated technological advances, the ‘P’ word – privacy – rightfully starts to enter the discourse. Indoor location itself has prompted a lot of discussion which we break down into one key topic - the exchange privacy vs value exchange.

At the start of spring this year, InnerSpace announced the close of a $3.2 million seed round led by BDC Capital’s Women in Technology Fund.  Recently, InnerSpace Chief Marketing Officer Cerys Goodall sat down with Anthony Lacavera of GlobalLive in partnership with BDC to discuss how the platform enhances productivity and improves employee well-being. 

At InnerSpace, we built our platform on the premise of effecting positive change through the use of location data. We take strategic aim at securely capturing data with privacy at its core.

From Collision to Queens University and the upcoming DC5G, our CEO James Wu has enlightened audiences across North America about how we’re dramatically changing the way indoor space is used – and the powerful benefits it brings to companies. We caught up with James between travel to get his thoughts on our company’s progress and why indoor location is the way of the future.

Anyone who’s worked in an office can attest to the fact that meetings can sometimes be a waste of time. But as it turns out, trying to find space to even hold a meeting can be wasteful on a far greater level. Client calls that go long and delay the next meeting; three people taking up a 15-seat boardroom; unannounced issues that require private space to chat – the reasons are varied and often frustrating.

Satisfaction in any company’s product or service often boils down to one key factor: ensuring an excellent experience. Looking after all the details that lead to happy people – while simultaneously managing deliverables and operating costs – is both tricky and critical to a company’s success. Yet knowing what and where to tweak and improve can be difficult to discern on a day-to-day basis – and relying on customer feedback alone can prolong percolating issues, or be misleading altogether.

Adoption of indoor location to create Smart Buildings remains highly customized and consultative. Indoor location technology is really hard to make autonomous and scalable. Using our platform, decision makers can understand insights related to their indoor spaces. The creativity ahead is unlimited.

Smart Stadiums are the digital transformation of sporting and entertainment events. We found a million ($) reasons for one client to go Smart.

Flexible work solutions including hotdesking and hotelling can help save on real estate and enable growth without expanding your foot print. Is it right for you?

This past week has been a blur! The global tech community had their eyes on Toronto as Collision marked its first year in our gorgeous city. Hosted at the Enercare Centre, the conference hosted the likes of Prime minister Justin Trudeau, Seth Rogan talking about Houseplant, Joseph Gordan-Levitt from HITRECORD, and more. Designed to be the perfect intersection between tech, investors, government, and media, Collision didn’t disappoint!

For thousands of years, people have flocked to stadiums and arenas to see exciting live events, and in those thousands of years—virtually no major updates have been made. Whether an ancient Roman at the Colosseum or a loyal Cubs fan at Wrigley Field, the experience is more or less the same. You arrive at the venue, find your seat, then and watch the action in front of you unfold.

InnerSpace closed its seed funding with a total of $3.2 million USD raised. The round was led by BDC Capital's Women in Tech fund, with support from MaRS Investment Accelerator Fund, 500 Startups, Industry Ventures, and Zach Coelius’s AngelList.

Beacons can be thought of as one-way transmitters from a fixed location. Beacons continuously transmit a signal, which are then detected by devices like smartphones when within range of the beacon. On the other hand, sensors are fixed-points that are connected directly to a control system - in our case the InnerSpace platform. Sensors only transmit a signal when a device, like a smartphone is detected. Sensors actively interact with the devices to gather information or track movements and then send it to the central platform which can then disseminate the gathered information to a wider variety of devices or applications.

Smart buildings drive new digital experiences for employees, while the backend data informs critical operations.

There are three things you need to focus on if you want to create a beneficial workplace experience that improves employee satisfaction and productivity, and supports your bottom line. Check out our latest blog post to find out what they are!

Managing commercial real estate with the power of people analytics, occupancy, time on site, and visitor frequency is critical to leasing structures and providing tenants with awesome service.

Your employees are wasting 45 minutes every day trying to find somewhere to work. Help employees find desks, meeting rooms, collaboration spaces based on their needs.

Win the war for talent with a focus on employee hospitality, seamless booking systems, and smart building technologies. InnerSpace uses wifi to capture people analytics and deliver employee services.

Wait Times is our latest product that works with our indoor location platform. Eliminate unproductive time, improve building operations, increase sales all by reducing how long people wait in lines. Wait Times is ideal for concession stands at sports venues, campus dining experiences, and more.

LiDAR, or Light Detection and Ranging, measures distance to a target by sending out pulsed laser light and measuring the reflected pulses that come back with a sensor. One of our goals at InnerSpace, is to make the process of enabling location intelligence as simple as possible for our customers.

Indoor location is the backbone to smart building initiatives. A single solution can drive a multitude of operating solutions and end-user experiences. Invest once and innovation is limitless.

What are the three things you need to create a great office? The environment, office design and technology can make your office superior. Do your employees love your office space?

Indoor location’s applications go far beyond shopping. It can dramatically improve labor deployment, real estate utilization, tenant experiences, facilities management, food services, and more. Check out the InnerSpace platform with proprietary sensors, and out-of-the-box business solutions.

Even though most people think about GPS when they think about location-based technology, it has evolved beyond GPS and is now heading indoors. After all, people spend a lot of time in places like shopping malls, grocery stores, office buildings, museums, hospitals, airports and more.

Find out how indoor location can be used to improve your business simply by incorporating intelligence into your decision-making, products and services.

We’ve been part of 500 Startups, IBM Innovation Space, and Creative Destruction Labs. Here are the top 5 things every startup should know to get the most out of their journey.

Apple stepped up its position for indoor way finding. But there's a fundamental problem with the company's approach. Scalability. Find out how new technologies have overcome the pitfalls of disparate technologies that plagued indoor location in the past.

While recent developments in indoor data are impressive, the best is yet to come. At InnerSpace, we believe 2018 is going to be a big year for indoor mapping and location data. In this post, we’ll look at some of the major trends that will shape the way indoor data will be used in the year ahead.

Using GPS and triangulation technology, Enhanced 911 (E911) has been successful in pinpointing locations. But only outdoors. When calls are made from malls, museums, warehouses, office towers and other indoor spaces, accurately pinpointing someone’s location is next to impossible.

If you’re involved in a startup, you know how quickly a business can move. Finding digital solutions that foster growth—by making your company leaner, improving your product or service, or developing your brand—can be a major key to success.

Using location intelligence and mapping can transform campus dining services by delivering a new perspective on your customers.

Indoor location intelligence can help property owners and managers deliver a better experience - while saving reset costs - for prospective tenants.

The demand for warehouse space has exploded in recent years as eCommerce continues to grow. But it's not just about the space. Customer expectations have evolved, which means warehouses need to operate more efficiently and extend services that reflect the customer journey.

On the surface, the retail crisis seems relatively simple. The rise in eCommerce has eliminated the costly real estate, staffing, inventory and franchising issues that plagues brick-and-mortar stores.

In 1998, a group of healthcare professionals stood in front of a map of the hospital where they worked. They unspooled a ball of blue yarn, which they then used to trace the path that a typical cancer patient had to take to receive chemotherapy. What they discovered shocked them.

When you think about the problem InnerSpace solves - being able to understand how people and things behave within a built space - our feline friends felt like a great way to celebrate a part of our internal culture, but also to communicate with prospective customers how they can use the InnerSpace platform.

This is "Johnny." He's the InnerSpace Sensor that digitizes indoor spaces - instantly and in real-time. Using WiFi, Bluetooth, LiDAR and a variety of other technologies, when combined with our proprietary algorithms, Johnny is a powerful solution.

Deloitte predicts that as of 2022 at least a quarter of all human and machine uses of precision digital navigation will include an indoor leg or be for an entirely indoor journey. This compares to less than five percent of all uses in 2017.

James recently sat down with BNN’s Catherine Murray to showcase how we are levelling the playing field for brick and mortar retailers who are competing against virtual stores.

We’re thrilled to let you know that InnerSpace has been selected by 500 Startups to join its next cohort.

InnerSpace showcased the future of commercial real estate technology with other industry leaders during the CRETech New York symposium. The event host CRETech is a information firm committed to being the best source of emerging and innovative commercial real estate technology.

Research by the TUC based on ONS data suggests that 4.2 million of us, or 13.7% of the workforce, now regularly work from home and another 1.8 million people would like to do so given the opportunity.

We are thrilled to be part of the Plug and Play IoT and Health accelerator program in Silicon Valley and welcome you to join us on June 23 for our pitch and demo at Plug and Play's Internet of Things and Health & Wellness EXPO.

Behind the black tarps that cover its entrance, construction workers with drills, hammers and paintbrushes in-hand work furiously to put the finishing touches on Saks Fifth Avenue’s first Canadian location.

It has been widely reported that we should expect more than seven billion people and businesses, and at least 30 billion devices, to be connected to the Internet by 2020, so it should be of no surprise that this tech-driven economy is here to stay.

5 years later stepping indoors still feels like stepping in to the 20th century - we huddle around kiosk directories for directions and use physical signage for way finding. Why? We aren't moving fast enough to solve the root problem - the maps.

We present this graphic in some of our pitches to potential customers who are considering building an indoor location experience based on a beacon infrastructure. It's useful, as it quickly communicates the idea that our BrickTrackers eliminate the need to compromise when deploying an indoor location.

The indoor location [aka indoor navigation] space is a hot market and the competitive landscape is certainly a busy one. Moreover, it has been for a couple of years now. As latecomers to the game, how can we expect to carve out a business?

While there is a lot of spending on IOT technologies to help retailers build the stores of the future, the lack of a single, turn-key product prohibits any solution from scaling across a retail chain.

InnerSpace solves a problem we all face. We spend 90% of our time indoors, with no digital awareness of our location once we step inside. The smartphone is the world's most pervasive computing device, yet it has failed to radically improve our experiences in the indoor world.