KJ. Spaces is turning offices into themed campuses.

Gland, Switzerland, 15.02.2024 13:00 CET: Kainjoo (founded in 2012) is launching KJ. Spaces a new service for global companies seeking innovative solutions to spark employee engagement and attract potential partners through open campuses following a wave of unfilled workplaces since COVID-19.

• Employees are looking for new forms of engagement in their workplace with vibrant events, communities and amenities pulling them to return.¹ 
• Corporations seek solutions to optimise their office spaces and transform them into attractive campuses in their respective markets or industries.²
• Kainjoo Spaces has expertise in optimising the Employee Experience (ExM) as well as creating new services and products that can differentiate brands and position them in their innovation eco-system

Since COVID-19, corporations & employees have re-emerged into new forms of working relationships, all bringing their pros and cons but leaving behind, especially for large HQs, unoptimised office spaces.¹

The boom of co-working and flex-offices solutions, on the other hand, is showing an increasing interest in building new forms of work, with employees slowly searching for a workplace where they could get new amenities, such as events and networking, leaving their house for more valuable interactions and ready to connect services (e.g. meeting rooms).²

With these two trends in mind, another form of workplace, themed campuses, is even more sought and understood by players such as big tech companies. A themed campus is a workplace usually known in the world of open innovation where startups, corporations, VCs, and employees can all work in the same geographic environment, all bound by a similar industry, interest, or profession. Examples of this new working environment exist in various scales, such as the Rocket Internet Tower in Berlin³ or the Station F⁴ in Paris. In Switzerland, some players have created an innovation ecosystem in the form of innovation parks in the past few years, attracting startups and the innovation labs of more giant corporations such as Logitech⁵ or Nestlé⁶. 

Fig. 1: Structure of the KJ. Space offering

This opens up an opportunity for corporations looking to bring back their employees in a new, meaningful way and be identified as the lighthouse on one or more themes connected to their businesses. For instance, Novartis⁷ has recently opened up a part of the campus to welcome the public and provide a place for everyone looking to disrupt healthcare.

Listening to their customers and working to build a solution, Kainjoo has, since the COVID period, worked on various projects to optimise the employee experience, especially for the front line (sales, marketing, customer service…). At the same time, the same customers were requesting to identify a new form of connectedness to enter their innovation ecosystem and pull the stakeholders towards them, making them natural leaders in their respective topics.

Mixing both challenges, Kainjoo created a new form of service called Kainjoo Spaces as a response to transforming part of a total workplace into an open-themed campus, enabling the company to pull both employees and potential partners to their brand. In 2022, a project named RE Group⁸ in Sion near the airport focused on Real Estate validated the business model and led to finalising the offering, which is now ready to scale in 2024.

Fig. 2: Example of a program and transfer of value from Kainjoo

First, Kainjoo will analyse the workplace or scout for one, running a feasibility study for piloting a min. The required footprint goes from 1.5 to 2K sqm, and running the place for the customer. This approach will involve setup costs to ensure security and digital transformation of the workplace to enable external partners to enter the building, consume services such as events or restaurants and consume either flex-offices (closed-door office) or a shared workspace with a model of renting one hot seat per day. Therefore, meeting rooms would be optimised to accommodate external members, and specific settings for managing events would be created if they do not exist. 

Kainjoo’s value for this project is to help also animate the campus through marketing, events, and content and bring a community manager to give sense to the workplace. Kainjoo will also be tasked with this offer to either create a new brand for that campus or promote the existing brands associated with the building. Last but not least, Kainjoo will support the commercialisation of the meeting rooms, flex offices, and shared seats to fulfil the company’s business case promise. Designed with corporations in mind, Kainjoo has identified clear steps to make these pilots a success, with a recent case in Gland of a 90% completion rate in less than nine months following the opening of the campus. “This also brings fewer risks to office space owners, as instead of 1 tenant, there is a business diversifying the entries for the duplicate square footage”, shares Haider Alleg, founder of Kainjoo. 

Tech-enabled, all Kainjoo solutions are easily connectable to existing IT systems and security requirements to ensure new partners are not accessing secured files or secured areas. In some cases, a dedicated floor with restricted badge access could be configured so that employees can access areas only company badges can access.

Fig. 3: Example of a planning

”With demands from corporations in innovative services for employee engagement and the promotion of their brand in an innovation ecosystem, our firm has designed this offering to be a quick, affordable and scalable solution.” explains Jacques Rouèche, director of PepperHub. 

With this new approach to fostering customer and employee experiences, Kainjoo Spaces could, in the future, be a solution not only for more giant corporations looking to optimise their brand recognition in a given industry but also bring to hospitality players such as hotels a new form of revenues coming from professional activities.

Fig. 4: PepperHub is a flex office in Gland

A business model showing immediate results as soon as the campus is ready can unlock a new form of relationship for corporations in city centres as we detect more employees’ demands to return to a new workplace within reach of train stations, airports or highways.”

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About Kainjoo SA

Kainjoo is a brand-tech firm based in Switzerland and operating globally. It specialises in supporting regulated industries in transforming their commercial operations through emerging technologies and channels. With a foot in the innovation ecosystem and a DNA for elegant branding, Kainjoo has innovated in bringing new CxM (Customer Excellence management) experiences translated into measurable business performance.

For more information, please contact

1. Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate
2. Employees Seek Personal Value and Purpose at Work. Be Prepared to Deliver
3. Rocket Internet Tower in Berlin
4. Station F: The world’s biggest startup campus set to open
5. Nestlé moves into Innovation Square at EPFL
6. A Logitech research centre opens at EPFL
7. The Novartis Campus in Basel is a place for new ideas and perspectives in the field of life sciences, a place where medicine is reimagined so patients can enjoy a longer and better life.
8. RE Group et l’art d’entreprendre ensemble: Un concept novateur dédié aux secteurs de l’immobilier