CC Scurzuzu
Collins/Woermann is a developer in Seattle WA, who like others was extraordinarily affected by stagnation in the housing, office and industrial building sectors leaving them hit hard by the recession. But they did something different that gives a new pattern for thinking about growth and maybe even a way to measure economic growth. They innovated responsibly.
All current measures of growth are based on an expansion definition of growth. It is not growth unless there is more of it, in more places, with different and additional markets. Rethinking, even redefining, growth is critical since as David Brooks of the NY Times points out in his July 29, 2010 Op-Ed column entitled, The Growth Imperative, “We could be in for a long, slow decade. There’s a confluence of forces that are probably going to retard economic vitality.” What’s a business to do? Communities also need economic growth for the taxes they rely on to provide services. But there is a flaw in how growth is conceived of, making it difficult to achieve in a slow economy.
Growth has three forms, not one. The most mundane is expansion where a business does more of the same stuff for more people and maybe gets more revenue. The second is extension. This form takes the known but moves it into new arenas that bring something of real value not present in the expansion version. Not line extensions, but something that really reaches into new territory. Google does this regularly with new services that do not exist at the moment, but are built from their expertise in search. For example, Google Alerts now searches while you are busy and once a day (or week) lets you know what it found. Extension growth provides a better offering and without the use of additional extractive resources when done responsibly.
The third type is evolution growth. This form changes the definition of a category or market such as Apple did with the iPhone. It most often obsoletes existing technology and aspirations. It is a key place to really bring in more responsible offerings and distribution methods. This is what Collins/Woermann did. They set out to grow evolutionarily.
C-W initiated their new direction by asking, “what had we suspected could be done that could change the face of the industry, its customer’s lives and the use of materials that were long known to cause ecologically problems”. They decided that the future was high-density living and it was certainly going to be in the heart of cities. However, it is currently too expensive because of land use patterns, labor and materials cost per square foot, and difficulty working with regulations and existing use patterns. They invented a proprietary way to reconcile these restraints with a new building process that cut the time from ground breaking to occupation by about half. They increased the livability by changing the direction usually chosen that gave each resident only a sliver of natural light to one where the majority of wall space is covered with recycled glass. And they created a construction process that made it easy to assemble unique structures based on each site, not the “ticky-tacky” looks of modular. They are beautiful inside and out. The first ones are going up now in South end of downtown Seattle that are making obsolete the problems developers usually face. The materials are nearly all recycled. Included are European appliance designs that have long exceeded US standards for energy efficiency, but most are built locally. At the end of the day, they have the ability to reduce their own high operating costs in an industry that must reinvent itself. They have reinvented how they will grow; done so responsibility; and created a product aligned with conscious consumer’s values and dreams of a beautiful affordable place to live and stay while on the road.
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