Architecture, Innovation, and What the Built Environment Needs to Learn

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast exploring how architects can build better businesses, embrace emerging technology, and create more sustainable, fulfilling practices. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, architect, angel investor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're running a firm, starting your career, or reimagining what's possible, this podcast challenges you to think differently about the future of architecture. The built environment is changing fast. If you want to be one of the people leading that change rather than responding to it, join me this summer for Innovation in the Built Environment, a professional intensive from the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Learn more at beradicallybetter.com. That's B-E-R-A-D-I-C-A-L-Y-B-E-T-T-E-R.com. I-c-a-l-l-y-b-e-t-t-e-r.com.

A Hello, disruptors. Welcome to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. The built environment is at a crossroads. There are roughly 165 companies right now actively trying to sell new technology into every corner of the AEC supply chain. Housing is, by one estimate, 10 times under-innovated compared to analogous industries. And the question hanging over all of it is one that I keep asking: are architects going to figure out startups first, or are startups going to figure out architecture first? Today, I am joined by two people I have been building something with. Brian Boyer is the founding director of the Bachelor of Science program in Urban Technology at the University of Michigan's Taubman College and Faculty Director at the University of Michigan Center for Innovation in Detroit, a $250 million initiative bringing a new master's degree and multidisciplinary innovation hub to the heart of downtown Detroit. Larry Fabroni is an architect, strategist, a recent MBA grad, and CIO of Practice of Architecture.

A Whose deep research into the housing sector is making the case that the opportunity for transformation in the built environment is bigger than the profession currently imagines. Together, the three of us have been developing a professional-intensive course called Innovation in the Built Environment, and this conversation is about why that course exists, who it is for, and why the moment to act on it is right now.

B Hi Brian, hi Larry, welcome back to the show. I'm so glad to have you both on with me today.

C Always great to be here.

D Hello.

B So the exciting thing is that we are all working on a course together, but that came out of a few different things, Brian, that you are working on. So before we jump into, I guess, what we're calling a professional intensive course, Brian, I'd love for you to tell our audience at Practice Disrupted, what you have been up to, and why we think this course is needed now.

D Sure. So what we spoke about previously was the undergraduate degree in urban technology, and that's trying to create a new liberal arts for people who care about cities. So it's addressing this question of, if you're a high school student thinking about college, you probably actually don't know necessarily the difference between architecture, urban design, urban planning, maybe even civil engineering. And yet lots of high school students are very passionate about cities as a place where there are issues in housing or transportation or whatever that, that can be addressed and improved. And so we created that degree as a kind of collector for all of that energy. And we graduated our first cohort last year. We're about to graduate the second cohort now, and they're approaching 200 students in the program. So there's some momentum there that's really exciting.

D And one of the things that we've been noticing is people asking what's next. And so we're going to launch the Master's of Urban Technology next year. And that's been an opportunity to think about where does it get more focused? And so the master's degree is zooming into questions about how the built environment gets made and what are the other perspectives that are needed amongst architecture, urban planning, real estate, and kind of the, the professional actors. And the thing that has sparked this for us, beyond the demand if you will, is an opportunity at the university. So the University of Michigan is creating something called the Center for Innovation in Detroit, which is a $250 million initiative. It's a 200,000 square foot educational facility right in downtown Detroit. And the goal of UMCI, as it's called, is to create a space where we can have multidisciplinary education. So the Master's of Urban Technology will be there.

D There'll be offerings in business, environmental justice, product management, and more as time goes on. The focus is on being applied. So we're working really carefully to inform the degrees by folks who are in industry, and also then to find ways that we can collaborate with industry in the classroom. For instance, through capstones. And of course, it's, it's in Detroit. And so the thing that's really special about Detroit, in my opinion, and in this context, because there are many things that are cool about Detroit, is that it's a place that has this amazing industrial might and a legacy of innovation and how we do manufacturing and hard technology. But it's also a place that has this really powerful social acumen. And so this is labor unions, it's marketing, it's the music that makes the marketing happen.

D So it's not just building the car, it's also helping society make sense of the car. And so when we think about urban technology and any kind of technology that changes your everyday life, I think those two sides of the equation, the technical and the social, are really, really important. And so that's one of the reasons why we're excited to do this in downtown Detroit.

B So Brian, you talked a little bit about the master's program and the evolution of it from the undergraduate program. Who is the master's program targeting then? And then we'll go ahead and jump into the course that we're putting together for the summer.

D Yeah, so one of the things that happened again and again as we were sharing the undergraduate degree with the world is that I would have alums or professionals who've been, you know, working for some number of years and they hear about what we're doing and they'd say, wow, I wish I could go back and do that. Like if I were going to college now, this is what I would do. And that sparks a conversation, right? So a number of times I found myself talking with people who are maybe in real estate development or, you know, they've been in an architecture office for, 5 years, something like that. And you kind of get a sense that the thing that brought them to urbanism broadly was an ambition to make places great for people, to make places great for communities. And that it's really, really hard to do that. You can be a super diligent professional, and yet the success of a project depends on a whole bunch of different people all working in the same direction with the same intentionality over a long period of time with huge amounts of money at stake and all sorts of complications in, in how you work together. And so often in those conversations, there was a sense of loss that the ambition that brought people into the built environment maybe wasn't honored by the supply chain, if you will. And so the thought with the master's degree is to create a place that we can have a conversation around how do we bring creativity to the work that we do and how we do that work in a way that mirrors the creativity that's applied every single day to the outputs.

D So we need to think differently about the business models, about the workflows, about how we approach the making of the built environment. And that, that's not a hobby. It's a focus. That's the thing that people who are leading firms every day think about. And it's certainly the thing that startups that are trying to move into the built environment space think about. And so right now, what we see is a collection of people inside firms really proactively trying to think about what the future looks like when robotics and AI are kind of knocking on the door, if you will. So those people we think of as intrapreneurs who are trying to reimagine their traditional businesses. And then there's another category of entrepreneurs who are trying to hold constant the idea that we, of course, need housing and public space and workspace, but maybe we don't need architecture firms or traditional real estate development firms.

D Maybe there are other ways to achieve those outcomes by pursuing different business models. And so we wanted to create the master's degree as a place where that community of people who are excited about pursuing better outcomes together and bringing real creativity to it, that they could have a home. And right now, it doesn't seem like there is one home for that type of thinking in any particular conference or journal or educational program or city for that matter. And so, that's what we're trying to do with the master's degree is to kind of plant a flag with that conversation and to try to build a community around it of both learners professors and industry collaborators.

C Yeah, I think what I, you know, what I found really exciting when I started learning about what you, what you were planning and getting involved with this was, you know, the, the idea that, yeah, I, I always felt like architecture schools and other design schools and people who work in the, in the built environment, we've been taught a good base of creativity and systems thinking, you know, we're inclined to think that way, but there's not really any sort of formalized frameworks that bridge that really strong education and foundation for leadership to this, I would say, emerging innovation economy. But it's emerged, right? And it's a, you know, and, and now it's a, you know, some people might consider it even, you know, invading into, into our industry now. And so, yeah, it's an issue that I'm particularly interested and focused on. And I think, yeah, we are, Evelyn and I, in the work we've done together. And I think, yeah, it's exciting that you and your team at U of M have really, I think, built an idea for how we start to build those frameworks.

D You are totally right that it's emerged. So we've been tracking startups in the space. Right now the database is 165 companies, and if I look at it, about 21% are, in our estimation, trying to sell to architects, sell new technology tools to architects, about 11% to owners, asset owners, about 15% to real estate developers, 11% to facilities managers, 12% to governments. So we're seeing, again, across that supply chain, people trying to address every little piece of it. Through new approaches and new thinking. And so I think that's also one of the things that is pretty hard to find, actually, is a place where all of those different parties are kind of being creative together. And that's really important here, that we get out of the silos that we spend so much time in.

C Yeah, and my work is revealing that it's a, it's a massive opportunity too, though. I'm looking at specifically housing, the housing sector, and My estimation is there's about 2,000 housing startups in the, in the United States, which, you know, sounds like a lot, but it's not when you compare it to other kind of analogous industries in cost structure and sort of capital and speed. Yeah, I, I believe we're about 10x under-innovative, which, you know, which means we have this massive opportunity to grow. And I think That opportunity needs to be realized by the type of teams that we're talking about, hoping will emerge from the class that we're creating and whatever happens beyond that, which are multi-domain expertise teams.

D When you shared that statistic before, I was like, this is exactly the type of thing that makes the work pressing. Which is we can sit all day long within the built environment professions and admire the challenges that we have, admire why it's hard to do things differently because we have slim margins or because we have very traditional cultures or because our professions are thousands of years old. And yet the outside world, the public, desperately needs more affordable housing. Our society desperately needs communities and spaces that help us live a healthier lifestyle. So we owe it in a way to the public to think more radically about how we do our work.

C Yeah, I think one of the disconnects that I— yeah, yeah, that I see a lot too is that the— we think so much about the end user, which we— is absolutely a kind of superpower of most architects, I think, is to really consider yeah, how the end user experiences the, the product of what that comes out of what we do. But so many of us working in the industry do not actually understand that the needs of the client, and it's our actual customer, whether that's an institution or whether, whether that's a real estate developer or any of the other, yeah, sectors that, that we might be operating within. That actual customer, oftentimes we don't understand that business model at all. I mean, I've talked to architects who are in practice for 30 or 40 years who ask me what a capital stack is when I mention it. And, you know, I don't want to get into too much jargon because we probably have listeners who may not know that either, and it's not their fault, right? We just haven't built those frameworks that help people understand that along the way.

B One of the things that I'm really focused on this year is motivation to action. I think, Brian, you kind of also alluded to, and Larry, that we talk a lot about the constraints and the concerns of the profession, but rarely ever, I think, are we presented with solutions for moving that forward. Brian, you were mentioning how you were tracking so many startups in this space. Larry, you were talking about the lack of innovation going into housing. And I just want to make it clear to our audience members that this isn't an area necessarily where you have to bootstrap a brand new company from scratch. Like, there's actually a lot of money coming into this space right now. And I think there's outside inertia pushing on it to the extent that Brian, actually, in your paper, From Inertia to Impact— and we talked about this offline— you're kind of bullish that architects might end up being employees of companies rather than leading our own companies. I would love for you to talk about, like, the real opportunity for those actors within the built environment to come together and move those conversations forward, but also the urgency with which we need to do that because of all of this other money and interest in the AEC space and kind of the, the timing of all this happening right now.

D So yeah, if we think about AECO— architecture, engineering, construction, and then real estate and operations— that's the supply chain that I keep talking about, and that's collectively the group of people who make an apartment building where there was not one, who make a university facility where there was not one. And in the paper that you mention, which we're going to publish later this year, what we do is we look at where is digital transformation pushing firms to act differently, where are client demands and regulatory demands pulling people to practice differently. So for instance, energy usage reporting requirements, things like this that sound really banal, but actually start to shift what then the clients ask of the architect. And then the inertia that we talked about before, that's kind of weighing down what would otherwise be, I think, forward movement, change in how we work. So in all of that, what we looked at is a handful of scenarios, and the two that we focus on the most are Fast Forward, which is traditional firms using more digital technology to work faster and cover more ground. And then a scenario that we call Eject, which is about people saying, you know what, it's not the architecture firm or the planning firm that I love, it's the making of places that are meaningful that I love. And so I can do that in many different ways. You know, we're talking about, Larry was talking about things that people don't get educated to do well in school.

D One of them that I think is kind of bananas is how to be a client. No one anywhere gets taught how to be a client to get the most out of the team that they're working with in the built environment. And so actually, there's a lot of power if you're somebody who's trained in planning or architecture. To go into a, a client organization, say like a big company building data centers, and do it in a more sensitive way, and, and use that point of leverage actually as an opportunity to say we can respect the needs of the business and we can respect the concerns of the community and make it a little bit better. Now the question is, how much better can you make it? And, and that's a serious question. But this eject scenario on the paper, I think what it puts forward is a question of Like, what do we really care about? And if we truly care about just places that are producing good outcomes for people, then the firm isn't as important in my opinion. And, and I think it also depends on what type of projects we're discussing. So, you know, in my personal opinion, I expect that fancy museums will always be designed by architecture firms working in whatever hyper bespoke process they want to have.

D But the notion that that's the pinnacle of aspiration for the vast majority of firms in the field producing all sorts of different building types feels like maybe it's not a good match when we again go back to the types of challenges at the societal level that Larry was itemizing, like the fact that housing is too damn expensive and too hard to build.

C So, I, yeah, I think another thing I've been thinking about, I think related to all this, is, yeah, the, this idea of the, the T-shaped employee, which is having deep expertise in your kind of specific domain, but the kind of cross-sector knowledge that allows you to sort of identify the gaps but also the solutions. And ideally, you know, I think fast-moving teams and more and more We're going to be working with smaller teams that are using more technology, and the fastest-moving teams are going to be the ones who have individuals with those deep knowledge expertise, but who have the knowledge across the domains and can collaborate with each other faster and better. They're going to be the ones who build the tools, I think, and the new business models or whatever other models were. We're looking at that actually solve problems and create the action that Evelyn started just by talking about. And I think, yeah, I think what you're doing at U of M and what we're hopefully kind of going to introduce people to in the class that we're going to be running is going to be able to strengthen that ability for individuals to operate as those T-shaped employees and leaders.

B I think that's a great segue to at least start talking about this class. So obviously, Brian, you mentioned that the master's program isn't going to start until next year, but we do want to kind of gauge interest. Hopefully we've piqued the minds of those individuals that are listening. Any— which one of you wants to jump in and begin talking about our course that we're putting together called Innovation in built environment. I know, Larry, do you want to, do you want to kick it off since you've been so deep in developing the curriculum there?

C Sure. And I think, yeah, I think people who are regular listeners here will, yeah, recognize me from a couple, a couple of episodes anyway. And, but, you know, for it, for anyone, yeah, who's not, I, you know, I've spent over 2 decades working as a as an architect, but, you know, decided a few years ago to go back and do a mid-career MBA. And I think what a large part of the impetus of that was, this frustration that I had pent up over, over time in feeling like all these great ideas and all of this creativity comes out of our work, And yet so little of it at the end of the day feels like it makes it into reality. And things we used to sell the projects, ideas we had to interact and benefit the communities, we could go on and on and on about that. And so I reached a point where I said, how do we differentiate what's a good idea from a good business idea? Which are the things that actually happen. And yeah, that was sort of the foundational driver for me to say, I want to understand all these parts of the decision-making process that I don't understand right now. And so I decided, yeah, I'm going to go back to school and invest in learning those things.

C And yeah, what I found is that there's just this— yeah, there's so much rich opportunity to expand the ways that we're creative and the ways that we can have impact, which I think is at the core of what most people who enter this industry want to have in one way or another, in their own ways, is to have impact, right? We want to ultimately build things and places that people can experience and love.

B As you were saying that, I was thinking back on our history, Larry, and I don't think Brian even realizes this, but you've been one of my longest friends in the architecture space. We met in undergrad when you were president of AIAS, and I think we've been, like, continuously trying to find ways to work together. So I was chair of the Young Architects Forum, and I turned the strategic planning of that committee on its head, and we launched the Practice Innovation Lab. Together, which in a way I think was also kind of a testing ground for everything that we were— are talking about. And then we actually followed that up with a secondary Practice Innovation Lab 2, which fewer people know about. But all of that has been really playing around the fringes of innovation within the AEC space and looking at different business models to really grow impact and value, but more importantly, to deliver upon like the, the social mission that I think so many of us ultimately went to school for. But anyways, sorry, I just had to kind of interject in this like long history of ways we've kept trying to come together, starting with studio culture to real-world implementation, to kind of roll it up into this Innovation in the Built Environment course that we're kicking off.

D Evelyn, this is exactly why I'm really excited to have both of you teaching this professional intensive. In May and June because it's something that you both have been working on for a long time. I feel so grateful that we crossed paths and realized that we had a shared interest here. And I think it speaks also to a theory of change for the built environment where, you know, I'm conscious, uh, people like Phil Bernstein have been thinking about this territory for a long time as well, and Phil's been very critical of technologies like BIM, which at a certain point was promised as, if we all just adopt this technology, everything's going to be fixed. And yet that hasn't really happened, right? The challenges of arguing for this or that design move because it's going to make a better building still exist, even if you're using BIM or AutoCAD or you're drawing it by hand. The challenges of thinking about a structure in a community and trying to honor the community's wishes, that tension still exists regardless of what the software is. So, what that tells me is that the focus needs to be, again, on the creativity and how we work, not in the outputs, that the software itself is not the thing. It's going to be there because we live in 2026.

D So, we're going to use digital tools to do our work. That's just not a very interesting conversation anymore. But what we need to think about is how we produce a community of people, or how we create the opportunity for people who are already in the world to find themselves as a community, and through that, flood the zone with people who are impatient and don't want to say, maybe next year I'll be able to realize the impact that I was hoping to have.

C Yes, I love that. A sense of urgency definitely matters, particularly because of how fast and increasingly fast things continue to move and how quickly decisions get made. I mean, I experience this constantly that people out in the world who are in leadership positions and actually have the decision-making authority, they want to make decisions and move on. We need more people out there who are going to ask the right questions, but be able to move at the speed that is required to deliver. Yeah, or we'll just be cycling through, sort of, yeah, I think in churning.

D So, I think this is really why we're focusing on bringing together people from across the A/E/C/O sector. So, for instance, in the architectural tradition that the three of us were educated in, data is often pretty light as one of the things used to tell a story about what we should do. A lot of it, frankly, is, is charisma. It's good storytelling, and that has a role. But then if I speak with my colleagues in urban planning, which is where the Urban Technology degree sits, they're very on top of using data to inform policy. But there's a gap between the policy level and then the design level. And so that's one of the things that we want to address. And, you know, if I think about, again, the professional intensive this summer, we hope that people, when they leave that short course, that they'll be able to make sharper arguments when they return to their firm, that they'll be able to have a, a better sense of when we look at emerging technology and piece of AI to help you do X, Y, or Z.

D Is it bullshit or not? Is it BS or not? Does it pass the sniff test? That ultimately we need to have a sharper conversation about where we need to spend money, or maybe we can wait a little bit longer. And I think probably at the highest level, the goal here is to be able to meet our clients where they are, because again, no matter where you are in the built environment, Often your clients are out in front looking for some kind of impact. They're asking for the design team and the development team to think about sustainability, to think about community, because they want to be able to tell their stakeholders that they delivered those things. And usually it's really hard to actually tell that in a concrete way, but that's the, you know, an example of the type of, data-based kind of perspective that we're hoping to grow in people who join the intensive.

A This episode is brought to you by the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. I am teaching their professional intensive course, Innovation in the Built Environment, and it is designed for practitioners who are ready to think differently about how the built environment gets made. Whether you're an architect, planner, developer, or somewhere in between, this course gives you the frameworks, the language, and the cross-sector perspective to lead change from wherever you sit. 5 weeks of virtual sessions plus an in-person intensive in Detroit. Find out more and register at beradicallybetter.com. That's B-E-R-A-D-I-C-A-L-L-Y-B-E-T-T-E-R.com.

C Yeah, yeah, I think, yeah, through professional experience. I think I want to be clear, like, yeah, I think this course should work for people who are either working in a company and want to be able to bring new skills and knowledge back, back to that company and be able to affect change, or people who are thinking about, yeah, how to launch something of their own. Because I think the, the idea is, you know, how do we from the start, speak the same language, and not just the same language as each other across these disciplines, but the same language that people out there in the world, in the investment community, in the larger entrepreneurial and innovation communities, the language that they're speaking. Because, yeah, honestly, there's a lot of jargon the same way we have it in architecture, and that every industry has it. It's not that the professor I worked with in business school, yeah, he's a venture capitalist and yeah, he explained it and said, yeah, look, there's just this other language you gotta learn. It's designed so that you won't understand it and it's designed to be hard and clunky to learn. But if you don't know it, you're gonna get taken advantage of and you're not gonna be able to participate in the most important conversations. And so, you know, are you going to learn all that in one class? No.

C But, you know, I think our hope is to expose people to the breadth of those ideas, the frameworks, you know, the baseline frameworks that people work from, and then to do some creative thinking together about what opportunities that there are and what gaps there are. And so, you know, we think about this as sort of, yeah, we'll have a We'll have a 5-week sequence of virtual classes so people can participate from, yeah, anywhere they are in, in the country or, or beyond, where we'll have sort of introduction and, you know, introduce some of, you know, our own work, you know, looking at the, uh, the landscape of entrepreneurship, you know, in the AECO space. We'll have an introduction into the those kind of basic frameworks and the larger industry structure and look at the value chain and do some work on sort of pressing into that and understanding that and looking at where gaps may exist more. And we'll look at the, what we call the incumbent models, the normal or kind of regularized models that exist in this space, but also into the entrepreneurial and sort of hybrid innovation models that are emerging both outside and inside of current companies. And what that'll all lead to is, I think what should be the most exciting part of the course for everyone is a 2-day intensive in Detroit with us and with other faculty, hopefully from U of M, so that students can meet them and people who would be involved in the master's program, you know, in the future, where teams that'll be working together throughout the course will synthesize and make a pitch for a concept, right? And we won't have a fully fleshed out, you know, business model, but I think the idea is how do we do sort of where I started the description of this, how do we identify the difference between a good idea and a good business idea and take the next step of actually formalizing that concept in a way that could be developed to actually pitch your company or pitch an investor, pitch a local government, whoever else you might need to sell on this new concept. And that, yeah, that'll sort of be the, yeah, the terminal event in the class. And hopefully that builds some momentum both for the cohort that we have to keep in touch and to do some work together, but also some excitement maybe from some of you who may say, yeah, I want to do more of this and explore what the opportunities are with the master's program or beyond.

B I'm really excited about all of that. And now that you've said it out loud and it's off our Google Doc, I'm like, wow, that's really ambitious for— for a 5-week course. For me, though, I think, you know, at a very minimum, if people come out of this— so, we're calling it a professional intensive, 5 weeks, Innovation in the Built Environment is the official name of it— is really just a reframe to even how they're doing things every day in the office, right? To really ask better questions and become better problem seekers. To get to newer outcomes. So much of what I have found when we talk about technology— Brian, you were alluding to BIM being the change-all, be-all kind of solution way back when. I always joke that there are still architects using Revit like it's CAD. It's not a technology problem, it's a cultural problem in terms of how that how we apply what we do and, and the way we think to the outcomes. So I think even at a very minimum, for me, ambitions all aside, if people go back to their offices, to their daily lives, and even just kind of question, why are we getting AI to replicate a process that is broken? Like, that in itself even is like a better mindset for, for these students to come out of that class with.

C Sure, yeah. And yeah, I think, uh, Evelyn, you, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm ready to run fast and hard, but I also know, you know, that the folks in this class will most likely be, you know, working, you know, working professionals, uh, you know, who are doing this in addition to that. And yeah, I don't want to scare people off thinking it's going to be, be like a second job, I think.

B But it could be. I mean, I'm not to say that it couldn't be a second job or a brand new opportunity.

C Yeah, no, I mean, but I think part of, part of what we talk about in like innovation, right, is the difference between— you can have incremental innovation, right? And that's, you know, for, for existing companies, that's precisely the, uh, that's precisely what you, what you want to have because you have established business models that are really hard to disrupt overnight. And so that's something we'll be covering is sort of, you know, what is the full range of sort of what innovation looks like and how to feel good about, you know, the small incremental moments of innovation that really can ultimately be the things that drive the biggest changes in companies and industries. And so, yeah, we're going to meet people where they're at. And, you know, I think we're gonna try to work hard to make sure that whoever signs up for this gets a really meaningful experience that can, that can translate back to wherever they're going.

D In the university, we think about the kind of ladder that students move through, and so this summer offering in my mind is maybe at the level of literacy and understanding, right? Just, just like gaining a new language, as you were suggesting, Larry, uh, using that in humble ways in our everyday work, as you were suggesting, Evelyn, and preparing or enabling those individuals then to keep going if they want to. And it is such a universe that the business world And same thing with the tech world. And those aren't, you know, it's not a fully overlapped Venn diagram. And so we need to create some scaffold for that understanding to develop, and we need to do it in a way that is balanced, right? So again, on the point about, you know, being able to smell what's hype and what's not, when a word like tech gets used, and we see this with the undergraduate degree, that is now humming along. When you say tech, people assume, oh, it's the AI, this is the model, it's the piece of software. And that is obviously very important, but tech businesses also are organized differently. They are funded differently. They have different internal teams.

D They spend their days differently. Those rituals, those structures are also very important. And so I think that gets to what you're describing, Evelyn, is just expanding our view a little bit to see how we can borrow and recompose ideas from elsewhere.

B This may sound a little off subject, but it's a question that I kind of want to pose to both of you because I've been thinking about innovation, specifically Brian, in tech, not tech AI, but tech as an industry and how hard it is, for instance, right now to keep up with everything that Claude, that Anthropic is rolling out for Claude and developing, like, just on a weekly basis, it seems now. And then the constraints we have around time within the built environment and how long it takes to deliver something innovative. I feel like some of that innovation or our lack of innovation or inability to pick up on that inertia is that longer timeline. So where are the opportunities there that you guys see?

D So I think of it as how do you make time and how do you resource that time? So, you know, in the built environment world, like for traditional firms, that is not a business model that can receive venture capital. But in the tech universe, which is organized around selling products that have a different revenue stream, it is possible to make a case that you think we can make 10x returns and therefore venture capital is appropriate. So this is one of the reasons why I think if, if we zoom out and look at where is innovation going to happen in the work of the built environment, actually think that that eject scenario I was describing is a plausible place for it simply because the business model aligns with an investment model that buys time to focus and do things differently. There is opportunity, and we see evidence of it in some large firms as well. You know, the, the economics of a small firm make it extremely difficult to have even an hour in the day to think differently. But larger firms, they, they have more ability to spread their resources and to carve out innovation teams that basically every major firm has in, in some shape now, whether it's innovation or strategy or digital or some combination of those. And we've interviewed a ton of them on the Urban Technology newsletter that I run. So I think it goes back to the question of, can we have a sharp enough thesis that we can zoom in on an opportunity and say this is worth pursuing, yes or no.

D If we try to just do something innovative, that's again a BS term, and you'll drain all your resource and all of your time and attention and all of your energy and willingness, frankly, because you haven't focused. But when you meet with VCs, venture capitalists, every single one of them that's successful anyways, has an extremely clear thesis about the world that they're investing in and what makes those investments successful. And even with that clarity, 9 out of 10 fail or, or don't make an outsized return. So I, I think it's also about how do we collectively— like, we have to have literacy and understanding so that we can make a clearer argument to ourselves about where innovation can happen and needs to happen in pieces that are bite-sized. And I think going back to the BIM analogy, this is perhaps one of the shifts is BIM is about radically changing everything. And that only works if you have the ability to work without collaborators, right? You have to get everybody to buy into that. So the impact when that happens is huge. But the likelihood is low.

D And the shift with urban technology is thinking more about, wow, a bunch of changes potentially with lower impact but higher likelihood. That's probably a more effective theory of change over time.

C I agree with, with all of that. I, I think, uh, I think understanding the venture capital world is important in all this, but Anyone who approaches this with the notion that that's the place to start necessarily even is— yeah, that's, that's probably not. It's a— I, yeah, I think it's a sector that could play a role in certain things. Part of my work looking at the, yeah, the housing issue is, yeah, has been really digging into sort of what, you know, what we call, yeah, a capital mismatch, right, in innovation and our industry, right? And that's what Brian is kind of alluding to there. And so, I feel like, on a broader sense, systems thinking is, and really formalizing that and bringing it into how we think about innovation in our industry is what is going to help us do that. How do we coordinate innovation, not just in the tech, but in the capital and in the policies? Because we're highly regulated. Industry too, right? And so like a lot of, you know, a lot of the uncertainty that comes with our projects is, uh, on the front end with the policy and regulations and how long it's going to take to get approvals and permit it and how long, yeah, if we need, if we need entitlements, things like that, right? But you're bringing up a great point, Evelyn, in that, you know, we need people thinking across these domains to solve these problems and figure out, yeah, How do we move faster? Yeah. Or how do we deliver something cheaper? Or how do we deliver a higher quality product? And yeah, there's like this old adage in, yeah, that architects like to like draw this like little tripartite like diagram that says like you can have two of these three, you can't have all of them.

C And I think what the, what the people who are seeking to disrupt our industry would say is we're going to figure out how to give you all three. And yeah, if we don't adopt that attitude and say not— say it's possible, we just need to figure out how, and we need to be a part of solving that because someone else is going to come in and say they've solved it otherwise— is, I mean, I think that's what's critical. And it's not something that just architects can do or just the construction professionals can do or just real estate developers or just policymakers. It's, you know, it's something that we need to figure out together, but that's what's going to do it, right?

A Yeah.

B And I want to go back to needing the vocabulary to figure out it together. Another thing that I've been thinking about so much, going back to— I don't, I don't know why we keep ending up at the BIM/Revit illustration here. It is hard to talk about the positive effect that Revit, AI, or any technology, for instance, can have if you don't have a basic understanding of what it is and the vocabulary that people outside of your sphere are using to talk about it, right? So, we always talk about wanting to show up and be a part of these bigger tables. We are great collaborators, et cetera. But I feel like to really get individuals to actually listen to us, even if we are the ones creating the table, it requires us to have a basic, fundamental, foundational understanding of all of these forces at play and how other people are talking about them. And for me, that's equally as important as what this even 5-week professional intensive can bring to the table.

C And I think it's like a good dose of humility. Architects are famously self-congratulatory about all that we do and all the things that we coordinate. And then, but once you're able to zoom out and yeah, actually sort of see, yeah, I shared with you all like, yeah, the diagram I was starting around the value chain in like, yeah, real estate development, right? And our, yeah, our next year, a few dots on there, but a real estate developer sees themselves in the same, if not a larger scope way, as the architects do, and rightfully so. We all have a right to feel like we're adding a lot of value to this thing. But I think, yeah, the dose of humility that says we need each other to innovate is, I think, really important and could push us further faster.

D This is, again, I think, one of the reasons why having a multidisciplinary classroom. So we're trying to create this professional intensive and then the eventual master's degree both to be welcoming to people from architecture all the way through the real estate and operations side. And there's a lot to learn across those disciplines. So for instance, as you noted, I think architects generally think of themselves as good communicators, but outside of our own professional silo, the opposite is often the perception, you know, that we hide behind our language. But spending time with folks in the real estate community and then the urban planning community, actually extremely good communicators in a broad room of people because they have to be like that is their work is to convince a bunch of people to make decisions together. And so, you know, that's one cross-disciplinary opportunity there. And this conversation makes me realize in a prior role when I was working at the Finnish Innovation Fund in Helsinki, I had the opportunity to do research globally about systems innovation, and we went to places like Chile to study housing down there. We went to hospitals in Singapore.

D We went to people manufacturing medical devices, like a super broad range of different things. And we were looking for people who are really good systems innovators and then interviewing them. And one of the themes that came up again and again is many times at some point, the person who was leading that interesting work would reveal that they went to architecture school or landscape architecture school. And so there is something about the built environment training as it is today that gives people a unique ability to think about systems that's critically important. And so that, that research I was doing was evidence that that skill set can go out. And I, I think one of the things that this conversation is bringing up is the importance of the opposite, of people from outside the built environment and those perspectives coming in in a deeper way, welcoming really sharp ideas about business, about finance, about the technology, about how we work as people. All of that needs to be more present. And it's not something that you learn in design studio.

D It's not something you learn in building systems. It's not something you learn in a planning course on research methods. It's outside of all of that, and that's why there's a need here.

C Evelyn, you've emerged as— and not just emerged, but you've worked tirelessly to become, I think, one of the leading voices on innovation and disruption in this space. And I'd like you to just talk for a minute about how this fits into the continuum we've talked about of your work in that space in, in this class yet, sort of as in that context, what really excites you about that.

B I agree, it's a continuum of work, and it's a continuum of work that I'm so grateful that you have been able to jump in and work with me on at various different points of your career too. Previously pre-MBA and now post-MBA. I think what's most exciting to me is I've been toying around, I think collectively we've been toying around this idea about what does it mean to create ultimately an accelerator of new business ideas coming out of the built environment and seeing and, you know, getting money to back that and really move them forward with momentum. But in order for any of that to happen, we need more people within this space thinking in that mindset and creating those ideas. And I feel like this is the true seed to, to getting ultimately that accelerator up and running. And I've been toying around with this idea from the start of the year, especially for those that have been following me on LinkedIn, it's this quote, "Are architects going to figure out startups first, or are startups going to figure out architecture first?" And I really think we are at this interesting crux where either architects will be the ones that are capable of leading the companies of the broader built environment forward, or the flip side is architects will find themselves as employees of companies. Leading the built environment forward. And if we want to continue to lead in this space, then I think we need to give our fellow architects greater vocabulary to actually be the leaders in that space.

C Well said. And, and to help them access the, the resources that, that'll help them do that, whether it's the people who can help them or whether, whether it's other types of resources. I think that's, that's an intimidating place to, to sit, is to not, is to not even really understand the landscape of what that is. Hopefully we can sort of open some eyes and some doors for people to be able to do that.

B So if any of you are listening and are interested with working with Larry and I in the future as part of this professional intensive, please join us this summer in our Innovation in the Built Environment course.

A This summer, join me for Innovation in the Built Environment, a professional intensive from the University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, built for practitioners who are ready to move from thinking about transformation to actually leading it. Learn more at beradicallybetter.co. That's B-E-R-A-D-I-C-A-L-L-Y-B-E-T-T-E-R.com. Hi, disruptors. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practiceofarchitecture.com. Podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community at practiceofarchitecture.com/community.

A Our social media handle is Practice of Arch.. That's Practice of A-R-C-H. We'd love to hear from you. So feel free to drop us a DM and say hello. Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.

E Mm-hmm.