Knowledge campus: why location is becoming a strategic lever again

Large companies are bringing work back into the city, into dense mixed-use districts served by public transit and integrated with housing, services and culture. Harvard Business Review calls this model the knowledge campus, and pairs it with a proposition that speaks directly to anyone who owns, manages or advises on office assets: measure location not as a cost per square foot, but as a lever for productivity and competitive advantage. For landlords, corporate real estate managers and advisors, this introduces a new metric, Return on Place, and an Italian case that makes it concrete: MIND in Milan and The Hive, managed by Stella33.

In brief

• The knowledge campus is a model in which knowledge-economy organizations choose dense, mixed-use, transit-connected urban districts that integrate work, daily life and relationships in a single place (source: Florida, Hamura, Boutenko, Konyukova, Harvard Business Review, May-June 2026).
• HBR measures the model through a knowledge campus index built on four dimensions: functional diversity, density of interactions, sectoral clusters and transit connectivity. The districts that conform most closely to the model show rising rents and lower vacancy.
• A 2025 HBR survey of 1,200 professionals across seven countries distinguishes work productivity from life productivity: in knowledge campuses the former is about 12 percent higher and the latter about 15 percent higher than in traditional districts.
• The proposed metric for location decisions is Return on Place (ROP): how effectively a location enables collaboration, reduces daily friction and strengthens culture, alongside the usual cost and utilization parameters.
• In Milan, MIND – Milano Innovation District, developed by Lendlease, applies the model at district scale; within MIND, The Hive, a 2,500-square-meter business center managed by Stella33, acts as a flexible service layer that lowers the barrier to entry.

Short answer: what a knowledge campus is

A knowledge campus is a dense, multifunctional urban area where work, housing, services and culture coexist in proximity and are anchored to a transit hub. Harvard Business Review (May-June 2026) describes it as a model closer to a university campus than to an office tower: it supports the full rhythm of the day, work, meetings, learning, socializing and movement, within a single connected place. The underlying logic is that, for work that depends on collaboration, judgment and learning from one another, being together still matters, and that the quality of the place determines how much time and energy people can devote to work.

Definition: the knowledge campus as a system, not a building

The transformation of office real estate is happening at a new scale. For years the unit of analysis was the building: floor area, location, rent, certifications. The knowledge campus model shifts the unit of analysis to the district, where research, corporate activity, education, healthcare and entrepreneurship converge in a system that evolves over time.

The HBR authors locate the mature origin of the model in Tokyo, where developers had been building mixed-use districts anchored to rail stations, at the scale of entire neighborhoods, since the 1990s, with 15-to-30-year horizons. While many Western cities kept building single-purpose towers, Tokyo was creating complete urban neighborhoods. In this paradigm, the workspace becomes a node in a broader infrastructure: proximity, the quality of public space, transit access and services generate value that no single building produces on its own.

The four dimensions of the knowledge campus index

HBR analyzed 39 business districts across 13 global megacities, focusing on the 15 that have undergone the most significant transformation since the 1990s, and derived an index built on four dimensions that distinguish places where work productivity and life productivity reinforce each other.

The first is functional diversity: the reintegration of offices, housing, services, culture and public space, with food, fitness and even childcare on-site or next door.

The second is density of interactions: bringing the professional and personal worlds into closer proximity generates the informal encounters that sustain culture, trust and collaboration.

The third is sectoral clusters: knowledge campuses take shape around concentrations of related industries, finance, technology, creative fields, where proximity strengthens knowledge sharing.

The fourth is transit connectivity: anchoring to major transit hubs reduces commuting friction, a driver not only of work productivity but also of workers’ life satisfaction.

The point that matters for landlords and advisors is the correlation with commercial performance. Comparing the 15 districts on index score and outcomes, measured through office rent growth between 2018 and 2024 and the 2024 vacancy rate, HBR finds that the districts closest to the model, such as Shibuya and Roppongi in Tokyo, Gangnam in Seoul and Umeda in Osaka, record the strongest commercial performance, while traditional districts such as Midtown and Lower Manhattan in New York, Canary Wharf in London and La Defense in Paris score lower on both the index and outcomes.

The two productivities: why commuting enters the calculation

The 2025 HBR survey covered 1,200 knowledge professionals across seven countries (France, Germany, India, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom, the United States) and is built around a distinction useful for anyone designing workspace strategy. Productivity has two interconnected dimensions: work productivity, what is accomplished in the office, and life productivity, what is accomplished outside it, from commuting to managing personal obligations to the rest that refuels the capacity to work.

According to the survey, overall productivity in the office is higher than when working from home, driven by greater collaboration and shared problem-solving. The picture shifts on life productivity, where commuting is the leading drain: respondents spend an average of 75 minutes traveling between home and office, time taken away from both work and personal life.

In knowledge campuses the two dimensions reinforce each other. On a normalized 0-100 scale, knowledge campus workers score an average of 63.4 on work productivity against 56.8 in traditional districts, an advantage of roughly 12 percent. On life productivity the gap is larger: 57.9 against 50.4, about 15 percent.

Why it matters: implications for each profile

For the institutional landlord, the knowledge campus redefines the perimeter of competition. An asset no longer competes only on location and floor area, but on the quality of the ecosystem it sits within. The correlation HBR documents between index score, rent growth and low vacancy offers a measurable argument: assets embedded in districts with high functional diversity and strong connectivity better protect rents and occupancy.

For the corporate real estate manager, the model shifts the criterion for choosing space. The real estate decision becomes an organizational and HR decision: the location serves to attract talent, reduce daily friction and build culture. The HBR case of Persol Career, which after relocating from Marunouchi to Roppongi saw voluntary office attendance rise by 75 percent and the share of employees reporting easier collaboration increase from 61 to 84 percent (company internal data), shows place as a lever for culture and performance.

For the advisor and capital markets, the analysis widens from the building to the system. Assessing an office asset within a knowledge campus requires reading the four dimensions of the index, the district’s development pipeline, the tenant mix and the supply of flexible services. Workspace becomes an ecosystem to be analyzed as a dynamic portfolio.

Return on Place: a metric for location

The most relevant operational proposal in the HBR article is a metric: Return on Place (ROP), namely how effectively a location enables collaboration, reduces friction and strengthens culture. HBR identifies three variables managers can measure during site selection, alongside traditional cost and utilization parameters.

The first is interaction and collaboration: assessing whether the location produces frequent informal encounters, inside and outside the building, counting the density of cafés, restaurants, shared meeting places, public spaces and street-level activity. The second is life productivity and commuting: measuring time, variability and quality of travel, and the friction of everyday tasks such as meals, errands and childcare coordination. The third is ecosystem strength: estimating the density of nearby headquarters of related firms, suppliers, startups, universities and institutions.

Analyzing these variables helps decide whether to retrofit an existing headquarters, build a new one, relocate to a district that already offers these conditions, or help create them. HBR distills the strategic implication into a formula: build districts, not buildings. An isolated headquarters becomes a competitive liability; attracting and retaining talent requires an ecosystem that extends beyond the office.

The MIND case in Milan, read through the four dimensions

MIND – Milano Innovation District is one of Europe’s most advanced experiments in knowledge-oriented urban regeneration. Developed by Lendlease on the former Expo 2015 site, it has built a clear positioning in the life sciences over time, attracting organizations, universities and significant tenants such as Human Technopole and AstraZeneca.

Read through the knowledge campus index, MIND displays the model’s traits. On functional diversity, it integrates research, healthcare, education, business and event spaces. On sectoral clusters, the concentration in life sciences generates proximity among related actors. On density of interactions, the district’s stated goal is cross-pollination among different organizations. Connectivity remains the dimension a peri-urban district like MIND continues to work on, and it is precisely the variable HBR identifies as decisive.

Domenico d’Alessio, marketing director of Lendlease in Italy, describes a multi-year journey consistent with the long horizon HBR documents for Tokyo: it began with the legacy Expo buildings, converted into offices, event spaces and service infrastructure to reactivate the site, followed by next-generation buildings, sustainable and high-performance, within a campus increasingly attractive for work and innovation.

The Hive: the service layer that activates the district

At the heart of MIND operates The Hive, a 2,500-square-meter business center managed by Stella33. Its role is twofold: to provide flexible, high-quality workspace solutions that let companies of different sizes operate within MIND without the rigidity of traditional leases, and to activate the relationships among tenants.

The Hive works as a point of entry into the district. It allows organizations to establish a presence within MIND without long-term real estate commitments, and the diversity of its tenants confirms this: from the Indian pharmaceutical company Glenmark to Nikon, from Italian organizations such as Bracco to niche players. Some companies use it as a representative office, others as a flexible operational base, others still as a weekly meeting point for distributed teams.

Stella33 has transformed the reception from a transitional zone into a living space, integrated with the meeting-room system and functional for informal work, events and catering. The traditional front desk has been replaced by a common table, and the staff operate as community and hospitality managers. This intervention acts on the dimension HBR places at the core of the model, density of interactions, and illustrates the shift from workspace as a product to workspace as a service. The dedicated piece on The Hive at MIND describes this logic in detail. The same principle appears in the Spark Business District at Santa Giulia, also developed by Lendlease, where Stella33 manages serviced offices in a multi-tenant building certified LEED Platinum and designed around Activity Based Working principles.

The convergence with flight to quality

The knowledge campus builds on the office market’s flight to quality, the concentration of demand on higher-grade assets. Quality has become a threshold for access, not a premium. In Europe, Savills reports that since the first quarter of 2020 prime rents in central business districts have grown by an average of 7.4 percent, against 1.1 percent for secondary space. In Italy, according to JLL, in 2024 roughly 70 percent of take-up between Milan and Rome concentrated on grade A space. CBRE 2026 data show average peak utilization at 80 percent, above the 65 percent target for the first time since the pandemic period, and a recomposition of floor area: between 2021 and 2025 the share dedicated to individual space fell from 56 to 35 percent, while collaboration and amenity space grew (source: CBRE Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights 2026, Limitless Workspace analysis).

The HBR reading adds the urban dimension to this convergence: an asset’s commercial performance increasingly depends on the quality of the district that contains it, rather than on the building alone.

Operational implications

Assess the asset within the ecosystem. The quality of the district, public transit access and the presence of services and housing should be integrated into the valuation, applying the three Return on Place variables alongside cost and utilization.

Add a flexibility layer. A flexible business center within a district, on The Hive model, lowers the barrier to entry, attracts tenants of different sizes and activates the relationships among them, working on density of interactions.

Work on connectivity. For peri-urban districts, the transit dimension is the lever that determines a district’s position on the index; it should be treated as a system priority, not an accessory feature.

Mistake to avoid. Treating flexibility as a mere reduction of floor area, or amenities as decoration. The value of the knowledge campus comes from activating relationships and reducing daily friction, not from physical provision alone.

Checklist: assessing an asset through a knowledge campus lens

• Does the district show real functional diversity, with housing, services and culture alongside offices?
• Is the asset anchored to a public transit hub that reduces commuting time and variability?
• Does the district host a sectoral cluster that generates proximity among related actors?
• Are there spaces and occasions that produce frequent informal interactions, inside and around the building?
• Is there a flexible workspace layer that lowers the barrier to entry for new tenants?
• Does the valuation integrate the three Return on Place variables, beyond cost and utilization parameters?

Frequently asked questions

Sources and methodological notes

• Richard Florida, Masaki Hamura, Vladislav Boutenko, Natalia Konyukova, “The Rise of the Urban Knowledge Campus”, Harvard Business Review, May-June 2026. Source for the model definition, the knowledge campus index and its four dimensions, the Return on Place metric, the 2025 survey of 1,200 professionals across seven countries, the analysis of 39 districts in 13 megacities, the Tokyo cases (Roppongi, Shibuya), the Persol Career data point (voluntary attendance +75 percent; easier collaboration from 61 to 84 percent, company internal data) and the examples of reinvented corporate headquarters (JPMorgan Chase 270 Park Avenue, Hudson Yards, One Vanderbilt, King’s Cross).
• CBRE, Global Workplace & Occupancy Insights 2026 (Adaptive Spaces), global sample of approximately 28 million square meters. Data on peak utilization and on the evolution of floor-area composition 2021-2025; Limitless Workspace analysis.
• Savills, prime CBD vs secondary rent dynamics in Europe since the first quarter of 2020.
• JLL, office take-up on grade A space in Italy (Milan and Rome), 2024.
• Stella33 and Limitless Workspace materials on MIND, The Hive and the Spark Business District.

Limits: the HBR survey productivity scores are self-reported and normalized on a 0-100 scale; the Persol Career figure comes from company internal data. Evidence on proximity concerns collaboration and innovation, and does not imply that every work activity requires physical co-presence. The reading of MIND through the four dimensions of the index is an application of the HBR framework by Limitless Workspace, not a formal measurement of the index for the district.