Worksumer, ten years on: the origin and evolution of a category

Who coined the term, with what definition and with what economic argument. A documented reconstruction of an Italian category that the international market later rediscovered under other names.

In brief

• The term worksumer was coined by Pietro Martani, at the time CEO of Windows on Europe and the founder of the Copernico concept. The sources traceable today document its public circulation as early as 12 January 2016; on 18 January, Corriere Innovazione published the interview that makes its definition and economic framework explicit.
• The original argument was economic in nature: the worker’s growing autonomy was read against the backdrop of two trends — the long-term compression of the rate of profit and the shortening of the average tenure of companies in the main stock indices. More than a causal demonstration, it was an interpretive key to the shift of part of the risk and of the decision-making from the perimeter of the organisation towards the individual.
• Over the course of 2016 the term spread rapidly in the Italian press. In later coverage, however, its meaning progressively narrowed, in some cases overlapping with the figure of the smart worker and losing the economic and organisational component present in the initial formulation.
• The term does not appear to have established itself as a category in the international literature of the sector. Partially overlapping themes have been developed under expressions such as consumerization of the workplace and employee experience; in March 2026, for example, Sue Asprey Price of JLL described workplace strategy as increasingly close to designing a consumer experience.
• For Limitless Workspace, the worksumer is a category for reading demand: it connects individual expectations about the work experience to corporate and real estate decisions on space, services and accessibility. Its analytical value lies in the reminder that the use of an office also depends on the perceived quality of the offering, not only on the contractual availability of workstations.

What worksumer means

The earliest sources traceable to January 2016 describe the worksumer as a fusion of worker and consumer and attribute to Pietro Martani the idea of a worker with consumption needs connected to work. The interview published by Corriere Innovazione on 18 January develops the concept in more articulated terms: the defining element is independence, understood as greater individual responsibility in building the conditions, tools and contexts of one’s own professional activity.

In the operational definition adopted today by Limitless Workspace, the worksumer is the individual who assesses their working environment also according to criteria typical of consumption choices: quality of experience, level of service, accessibility, freedom of choice and consistency with their own way of working. For office real estate this introduces a further variable into demand: space is judged not only by location, floor area and cost, but by what it allows people to do and by the quality of the experience it makes possible.

This reading was taken up by Martani himself in an interview published on TechCompany360 on 1 September 2026, where the worksumer is described as the figure in which the personal and professional spheres overlap and in which people express growing expectations and awareness about the quality of the work experience.

The economic argument that was lost

The most original part of the 2016 interview concerns the attempt to explain why the worker was taking on a more autonomous and selective role. The reasoning rests on two historical series, used as an interpretive frame rather than as causal proof of the phenomenon.

The first is the long-term downward trend in the rate of profit, documented by Esteban Ezequiel Maito in The historical transience of capital (MPRA, 2014), which reconstructs historical series across fourteen countries and identifies a long-run descending trajectory with phases of partial recovery. In the 2016 interview the values are summarised as a move from around 40% in the last quarter of the nineteenth century to roughly 15–16% today. The quantity measured is the rate of profit on invested capital, not the accounting margin of listed companies; moreover, the reading of the trend remains the subject of academic debate.

The second is the shortening of the average tenure of companies in the main stock indices. The study Creative Destruction Whips through Corporate America, by Richard Foster for Innosight (2012), reports for the S&P 500 an average tenure of 61 years in 1958, 25 years in 1980 and around 18 years at the time of the study. The figure signals a faster turnover of the index, not the average lifespan of companies in general.

The reasoning that holds the two series together runs as follows: when organisations become less stable and the relationship between company and individual more exposed to change, a greater share of the decisions about professional continuity, tools and places of work falls on the person. It is at this point that the relationship with space also takes on a dimension of choice and consumption. This component of the 2016 argument has progressively been lost in later popularisation, but it remains useful for understanding why the contemporary workspace is increasingly assessed as a set of conditions, services and experiences.

Where the worksumer comes from: prosumer, third place, experience economy

The worksumer sits within a recognisable genealogy, and placing it correctly helps to distinguish what the term adds.

Alvin Toffler introduced the prosumer in The Third Wave (1980) to describe the convergence between those who produce and those who consume. Ray Oldenburg defined the third place in The Great Good Place (1989): the informal public spaces located between home and work. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore formalised the experience economy in Harvard Business Review in 1998 and in the book of the same name in 1999, where experience is treated as an economic offering distinct from service.

The specific contribution of the worksumer concerns its point of application: it brings the logic of choice and experience inside the relationship between individual, work and space. Compared with the prosumer, the focus is not the overlap between the production and consumption of a good; compared with the third place, it is not the positioning of a space between home and office. The category instead observes the worker as a subject who actively evaluates the material and relational conditions of work. This is why it can be useful to those working in office real estate, workplace strategy and organisation.

How the term spread in 2016

Its diffusion is concentrated in the first weeks of 2016 and can today be documented through several sources. One of the earliest traceable occurrences dates to 12 January, when MixerPlanet/InstoreMag described worksumers as workers with consumption needs related to space, time, content, technology, network, wellbeing and food, attributing the definition to Copernico and Pietro Martani. In the following days the term was picked up by other outlets; on 18 January Corriere Innovazione published the interview that consolidated its attribution and made its economic background explicit. On 25 January, Ninja Marketing contributed further to the spread of the term.

Over the course of the same year the meaning narrowed. In the earliest formulations the worksumer describes an economic and organisational figure; in later coverage it tends to become a generational or professional profile, associated with mobility and the creative professions. In September 2016, in the article devoted to Clubhouse Brera, the term was used to introduce bleisure; in 2017 some references brought it simply closer to those alternating smart working and the office. The original economic component thus moved into the background.

Why it matters: implications for landlords, corporates and advisors

For the institutional landlord. If part of demand also assesses space as an experience of use, then product quality, services and accessibility enter more directly into the asset’s ability to attract and retain occupiers. Active management therefore becomes a component of the building’s value proposition, alongside location, technical quality and contractual structure.

For the corporate real estate manager. The real estate decision incorporates a variable of individual attractiveness that must be observed together with TCO (Total Cost of Occupancy), actual utilisation and quality of experience. A workspace governance model that measures only available floor area and contractual occupancy risks overestimating the effectiveness of space in supporting real behaviour.

For the advisor. The worksumer offers a frame for reading why assets with similar real estate characteristics can produce different levels of utilisation and satisfaction. In right-sizing exercises it also helps to justify functions that do not coincide with the individual workstation — collaborative spaces, social areas and services — provided they are linked to observable needs and behaviours.

The first applied case: Clubhouse Brera, Milan 2016

One of the first documented operational translations of the category is the Clubhouse Brera project in Milan, described in September 2016 by Alfredo Arena in People&Change. The space integrates meeting rooms, informal lounges and food and beverage, with a design that interprets the short business trip as a continuous experience. The article places the project within the bleisure strand and references international benchmarks linked to hospitality and flexible access to workspace.

The case is interesting for a methodological reason: in 2016 the worksumer category was used as a design criterion before it had ever been measured. Empirical verification remains the open question, and will be the subject of the third article in this series.

Operational implications

The shift from demand for a workstation to demand for consumption changes the indicators used to read an office asset. The table below summarises the difference in reading.

Three recurring mistakes deserve attention. The first is treating amenities as an image element without linking them to utilisation indicators. The second is relying solely on declared satisfaction, without comparing it against observed behaviour and presence data. The third is applying the category uniformly across the entire company population, ignoring that autonomy, role, activity and the real ability to choose where to work vary significantly between people and functions.

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