"So, how was California??"
It's been the question of the week, and now that we've successfully battled off the jetlag, it's time we answered the question!
First up, a bit of background: the KOPE team sent Radu (CTO) and myself Ollie (PM) out to the Bay Area to talk at Stanford's Industrialized Construction Forum. The one-day event on 7th February brought together global leaders in the space of offsite construction, from manufacturers and contractors to thought leaders, academics and software startups.
Part 1: NVIDIA
The event kicked off the night before the Forum, where attendees were invited to visit the brand new NVIDIA campus in the heart of Silicon Valley. We were treated to a guided tour of their new offices, and got to see some of the leading GPU-maker's latest AI research. We're under NDA about the details, but needless to say it was a breathtaking glimpse into the future of AI-augmented design on a whole range of creative fronts! The evening wrapped up with a networking event to help the next day's attendees get to know each other.
Part 2: The IC Forum
The next morning, bright and early (although the middle of the afternoon for us Brits), we descended upon the beautiful Stanford campus in characteristically perfect weather. The campus is richly-planted, lively and expansive. It was almost a shame to pull ourselves inside for the day, but we had a job to do.
The presentations were grouped across 3 overarching topics:
- Distributed Networks of Manufacturing
- Factory of the Future
- IC in Large Companies
The first session focused mainly on software startups working within the offsite construction sector. KOPE presented its latest work alongside PT Blink and AU-AR. The talks were well-received and we were happy to be able to go into an unprecedented level of detail about both our mission and the technology that's going to drive us there. The session finished up with a panel discussion in which Radu debated the nuances of offsite platforms among the other presenters.
The two other sessions focused on factory setup (from industry veteran Helena Lidelow), offsite system design and business models, with speakers from VBC, Plant Prefab, Clark Pacific, Grupyus, Obayashi, Mortensen and Bouygues. As with the first session, we were able to see richly-detailed debate and lessons learned from companies with (often) decades of experience in offsite construction.
We enjoyed the forum immensely, as it's rare to see a mature discussion about the offsite industry at these kind of events. Often, we spend too much time trying to convince the industry that an industrialized approach to construction is the future - here, instead, we were preaching to the choir! We were able to skip past the usual themes and see deep debate about the 'how' of setting up IC factories, business models and technology platforms. We hope to see much more of this content-rich and nuanced discussion in the future and will certainly be attending next year!
