Innovation Design Consortium
Formation
The Innovation Design Consortium (IDC) is a public benefit corporation initially established with funding from thirty nine of the largest architecture and engineering companies in the United States. Those firms, all members of the AIA Large Firm Round Table, concluded that each of them was spending funds from their technology budgets to solve issues that they all held in common. It made sense to pool resources to overcome these technology challenges which did nothing to differentiate one firm from another. After much discussion, it became clear that these efforts could benefit all design firms and so the IDC was created as a separate entity from the AIA Large Firm Round Table in order to expand access to its technology innovations to all interested parties. Following an initial year of organizational efforts which led to the development of the first few technology deliverables, membership in the IDC which provides access to those initial deliverables along with new solutions in the pipeline will be opened up to all firms on a subscription basis.
Structure
The founding thirty nine firms vary in size from about 150 people to over 2,000 and have offices spread widely across the United States and overseas. They each have a representative on the IDC Steering Committee, many of those representatives are CIO’s or Design Technology Leaders at their firms. That committee meets monthly and provides input on the value of completed solutions and suggestions for new projects. The Steering Committee is governed by six of its members who are elected to serve on the Executive Committee, with one of them serving as the Chair and another as Secretary. Every IDC project is assigned an Executive Committee member to be its Champion. Work on projects is conducted by a combination of staff from the member firms and third party contractors. The IDC is governed by a seven-person Board of Directors, comprised of leaders from the member firms. The Board meets monthly, sets policy and strategy for the IDC, and deliberates on requests for project funding which come from the Executive Committee.
What Our Goals Are
- Data Sharing: Create a culture of sharing to accelerate creation of standards and platforms that enable seamless sharing of data resulting in a progression of research, design, delivery models, and data collection/analysis.
- Performance & Sustainability: We intend to work collaboratively to reduce the friction involved in designing for, measuring, and continually reporting on the performance and sustainability of our projects and the industry to achieve our collective goals around sustainability.
- Operational Efficiencies: Reduce initial development costs and ongoing expenses of common industry processes, standards, and technologies to improve the operational efficiency of individual firms and to drive industry advancement and performance.
- Redefining Project Delivery: To equitably coalesce our individual investments through a shared vision of our future...and enable our profession to create greater positive impact by expanding our opportunities for Project Delivery.
At the IDC, our actions are designed to help our members to compete more effectively and efficiently, thus benefiting their customers and stakeholders as well as the entire industry. We understand and appreciate the importance of the antitrust laws. We have worked with experts to take appropriate steps to assure antitrust compliance. Feel free to contact us to better understand our compliance policies and procedures.
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