Living and Building Together: A Global Study of Residency Programmes and Venture Development in the Age of AI

Abstract

At the moment when AI tools and remote work have made location-independent venture-building more feasible than ever, a growing number of entrepreneurial support programmes demand the opposite: founders must relocate and live together. This thesis investigates residency-model programmes: time-bounded experiences that bundle co-living, co-working, and venture development. Four bodies of literature each illuminate part of the phenomenon: accelerator design, co-living and digital nomadism, serendipity and proximity, and remote work. None has examined how all three are intentionally integrated. Drawing on the People-Place Nexus and an orientation typology of educational, social, and economic objectives, the study asks how programmes design this integration and what value it creates for participants, with sub-questions on design logic, participant experience, and emergent outcomes.The study adopts an exploratory qualitative design. Data were collected from 18 informants (13 participants and 5 staff) across three programmes globally, supplemented by one documentary source, through semi-structured remote interviews and written and voice responses. Reflexive thematic analysis was applied within an AI-assisted workflow with researcher-led adjudication, producing one overarching theme, four themes, and six sub-themes from 523 coded segments. The overarching theme, it's a lifestyle, not a programme, frames four themes: the experience is the people (relational primacy), you have to actually be there (irreducible physical co-presence), running a household for the first time is not easy (friction and reactive governance), and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (compound emergent value detectable through participants' post-programme withdrawal). The findings support four theoretical contributions: extending the People-Place Nexus to a 24-hour residential context by introducing vulnerability as a cross-cutting mechanism, structural transparency, and the withdrawal effect; reframing the orientation typology by showing social co-presence as the primary channel through which educational and economic outcomes are delivered; arguing that bundled value and bundled cost are structurally inseparable; and providing empirical support for reading the model as a deliberate AI-era re-bundling response. Limitations regarding sample composition, remote-interview design, and AI-mediated analysis are discussed.