David Marks
- Macro economic situation and recent developments have forced business models to change
- Now business must reflect the pressing need to reduce its reliance on debt
- Businesses need to be encouraged (by regulation, incentives?) to find a new relationship between investment and debt – need to end the beneficial accounting of debt as opposed to investment
- The aim should be to encourage entrepreneurial activity, SMEs, increase stability, create sustainable growth and reward innovation
Geoff McCormick
- Growing realisation that the design process should be shaped and driven by peoples’ experiences (for both consumer product and building design)
- Increasing requirement for designers to specify more clearly, particularly in an outsourced global market with diffuse centres of design, production and sales
- Specification and user experience-based design lead to lean innovation and responsible design, based on real user needs
Dave Hampton
- Critical importance of tackling carbon – the new business imperative
- Reducing carbon makes business sense – lower costs, less energy use, added value, PR and CSR, and insulates business against future rises in energy costs
- Businesses need to take a creative and human approach to reducing energy use to achieve large reductions
Ian Chance
- A new creative and cultural leadership is emerging – ‘creative entrepreneurs’
- Creative entrepreneurs are about maximising social and cultural benefits, not just commercial opportunities
- This holds challenges for architecture as traditionally architecture practices are narrow in their ways of working, and there is little encouragement of entrepreneurship in architectural training
Overarching Message – the power that design has to improve people’s lives at the same time as delivering business success
Q+As
Q) How to get carbon challenge communicated to Government?
- Seek to identify creative approaches – cannot be business as usual
- It can’t just be reliant on Government
- Society/business need believable role models
- Challenge wasteful systems
- Challenge the client
Q) Does bureaucracy and regulation affect creative entrepreneurs?
- Creativity and entrepreneurship are the same thing
- Don’t let regulation get in the way – take chances and work around problems
- E.g. the London Eye was originally a losing entry to an ideas competition but is now a commercial, internationally renowned iconic success story
Observations
- A growing gap between graduates in the UK and what is needed in the global market (not just among architects)
- Greater crossover between faculties, and between education and business is needed (through programmes, and co- location)
- Question whether architects leave university with the required business skills
