Eric Corey Freed

An introductory overview of sustainable design and green building. Includes discussion of why green building is important and an introductory look at the lifecycle of a product.

An intermediate level discussion exploring the areas of Suburbia, New Orleans and Las Vegas as absurd environmental regions. The talk explores how to identify potential areas of energy and resource savings and maps out a plan to fix them.

This talk walks you through the various problems with Energy, Water, Siting, Materials and Air Quality. It points out the often absurd means by which we build our buildings and then explores dozens of practical, tangible solutions for how to correct them.

An advanced discussion of the plight of the modern American City. The discussion ends with a humorous and thought-provoking look at lobbyist and how they are controlling our environmental policies.

An exploration of the hospitality design industry and a plan for how to cut its water and energy usage by more than half.

An advanced discussion of modern day school design and how to uncover ways to save energy, water and resources. This talk also suggests means to make the entire building a vehicle for learning.

You are in the innovation and problem-solving business.  Yet, you are struggling to push your ideas with staff and clients.

The level of conformity in any organization is in inverse proportion to its creative ability.  The success of your design firm depends on your ability to provide bold, creative solutions and ideas.  But what if the conventional wisdom you’ve been following is actually blocking your pathways to innovation?  We call it:  Wisdumb™.

Wisdumb is the business standards that are outdated and ineffective in a changing world, and it’s ruining your business and practice.

In this session, we’ll explore how to drive Wisdumb out of your business and devise an innovation strategy instead, using our Innovation Agreements.

We developed this insight through our work with hundreds of organizations, companies, and municipalities on accelerating their sustainability plans but removing these barriers to innovation and creative thinking.  We’ll identify these institutional blocks to creativity and how to transform the aspects of your organization and team that are lagging.

We’ll explore the ways that traditional business thinking and industry standards are holding you back, losing you customers, and destroying your competitive advantage.

By attending this talk, attendees will learn how to identify the top obstacles to their business, their blockages to growth and change, and how to develop a path forward to innovate and transform their business or projects.  This is an innovation crash course in change management showing you how to rally your team, your clients and your consultants toward enacting deep transformations and goals.

So if you’ve always wanted to work on a creative project, packed with your best ideas, but it always gets “value-engineered” out in the design stage, this session will show you how to commit to these grand ideas, get clients excited, and embed them into your work.

Learning Objectives:

• Formulate a new approach to collecting institutional knowledge inside your company
• Devise a plan to lead your team through an innovation strategy to achieve specific outcomes, such as achieving zero carbon
• Discover how you can use “uncompetitive purposefulness” to grow teams that work together
• Develop processes to eliminate corporate bias and groupthink that block thinking big and innovation