Liberty Mutual Insurance has 590,000 square feet to play with in its 22-story Back Bay headquarters. But for all of that space, it’s still putting about a dozen of its employees in tiny office space near South Station, elbow-to-elbow with tenants still working to make their first profits.
It’s not out of necessity. The Fortune 100 company opted to put its new in-house incubator, Solaria Labs, in WeWork’s shared office space on Atlantic Avenue because it wants team members thinking like a startup, and not necessarily like a century-old insurance company.