Launch pad: co-working spaces help innovate Utah startups.

• Author: Springer, Alex
• Position: Business Trends

While Utah's fertile business climate has allowed local startups like Qualtrics and Pluralsight to become major international players, it has also ushered in hundreds of other ambitious startups that are competing for resources and market share. It's a rapidly evolving and growing world, and for fresh-faced entrepreneurs, the competitive climate can be extremely intimidating. Luckily, Utah is also a place that values its up-and-coming companies, and that value is demonstrated through several co-working spaces that are designed to offer workspace, resources and networking opportunities for startups looking to get their feet off the ground.

A catalyst for innovation

Co-working spaces provide an affordable place for smaller companies to call home. For a monthly rental fee, entrepreneurs can use these facilities--which are typically decked out with high speed internet, open floorplans and stocked breakrooms--to help their startup grow. While the workspace alone is valuable for these startups, the underlying value of these organizations is the ability to bring passionate and motivated people together under one roof.

Both Salt Lake's Impact Hub and Ogden's Startup Ogden, for example, are designed to help entrepreneurs collaborate with like-minded individuals.

"Entrepreneurs wear so many hats," says Dustin Haggett, co-founder and CEO of Impact Hub Salt Lake. "If you've got this community that can help mentor or provide support, it just accelerates the process."

Aside from the wealth of material resources that co-working spaces provide for startups, the reason that they are becoming so attractive is because they foster a real climate of collaboration. "During business hours, the doors are unlocked and anyone can come to work for the day or a few days," says Alex Lawrence, vice provost for Weber State University and chairman of Startup Ogden.

Not only does his organization encourage participation in the workplace, but it also hosts events like Hack Ogden, a weekly meetup for software developers and designers. This mixture of work and social space often becomes the catalyst for innovative collaboration among different disciplines.

In addition to fostering an environment where entrepreneurs from all walks of life can work comfortably together, co-working spaces also strive to connect their members to the larger world of business. "A lot of the solutions are going to take public and private partnerships," Haggett says, "so we like to be this middle...