02 May 2008

Within Trillion Dollar Sectors are Billion Dollar Opportunities...

I had the delightful good fortune just now of running into MIT Professor Larry Sass -- Director of the Digital Design Fabrication Group -- in his architecture fab lab. He and students are in the middle of the latest incarnation of their snap-to-fit full-scale building initiative. I first witnessed this effort in real-time as they built their first "plywood cabin" out of field-cut rapid-printed plywood parts right behind the MIT Museum on Mass Ave... This fast-fab effort alone is hugely compelling and will, no doubt, transform construction approaches in rich and developing countries alike.

As I walked Larry to his bus stop, we chatted about how his own broad body of work is a key element of the emergent revolution in the enormous arena of architecture + building technologies + construction + development + real estate finance. Economic and practical considerations are driving real innovations in energy efficiency, assembly methods, construction processes, materials uses, lifecycle accountability, total-system financing, and more! As he boarded the bus I told him why this is so fantastically exciting to me: in trillion dollar economic sectors there are multiple billion dollar opportunities awaiting those who are inventive and entrepreneurial enough to grasp them!

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