Making the best use of precious space

OCI
Where Next Happens
Published in
2 min readFeb 27, 2020

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In an era when the price of corporate office space in desirable locations can be astronomically high, businesses are actively looking for ways to reduce costs.

With its innovative hardware-enabled software platform, Innerspace is addressing this need. The company delivers indoor location services to commercial buildings far faster and at a lower cost than existing competitive solutions.

Their platform makes it simple and fast to delivery useful applications for the workplace. For example, it allows companies to determine how many desks relative to employees they would need with a shared workplace model to right-size their footprint without a lot of wasted effort and loss of productivity.

“We help businesses understand how their space is being used by the people that occupy it, and this is broadly applicable across a lot of verticals including retail or commercial real estate,” says James Wu, CEO of Innerspace.

Innerspace partnered with a global food service and support services company, on projects supported by both the IBM Innovation Incubator Program Customer Demonstration Project, and the Market Readiness Customer Creation program. Innerspace was able to demonstrate how their technology could help the provider, which operates cafeterias in 50,000 commercial buildings identify opportunities to optimize operations, improve customer satisfaction, and reduce labour costs through workflow optimization. With the location intelligence platform, InnerSpace’s partner gains access to data about where people spend time within the commercial spaces they manage and can make active and informed decisions about resource deployment to help manage payroll costs.

“Participating in OCE’s program significantly contributed to our ability to close a large commercial partnership deal,” says CEO Wu. “That partnership deal was core to our ability to raise $2.1 million at the end of 2018 and has led to date to $250 thousand in incremental sales, with more to come.” The company has created six new jobs and secured six new customers for its technology.

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Ontario Centre of Innovation is the pre-eminent research-to-commercialization vehicle in Ontario.