How spaces shape collaboration and entrepreneurship

In this episode, we’re diving into how physical spaces—campuses, libraries, innovation hubs—can be designed not just to house activity, but to actively enable collaboration, entrepreneurship, and student success.

For that, we have invited design strategist Elliot Felix, Partner and US Education Sector Leader at Buro Happold, to share how universities can create spaces that truly support student success, innovation, and meaningful connection.

For that, we have invited design strategist Elliot Felix, Partner and US Education Sector Leader at Buro Happold, to share how universities can create spaces that truly support student success, innovation, and meaningful connection.

You can listen to the full interview in our podcast:

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Transcript

Madeline Arkins:

Today we are talking about “Designing innovation: How spaces shape collaboration and entrepreneurship”, and I am really interested to hear about this design focus.

We have had some speakers before with a design background, and I must say, I always find it a really interesting way to frame challenges in higher education. From today’s guest, Elliot Felix, Buro Happold has written: “A partnership is fundamentally an organisational design problem that needs clarity of purpose, process, roles, and structure, or more aptly, ‘probletunities’.” I love that word.

That lens is exactly what we will explore today, how we can design campuses and spaces, not just to house activity, but also to enable it in a more meaningful way and to guide us through this discussion. I am joined by someone who has done exactly this for many an institution, Elliot Felix.

Elliot is a student success author, speaker, and consultant who has worked with over a hundred colleges and universities. He uses his background in design to create better connected institutions by improving the spaces students learn and live in, the support services they rely on and the technology they use.

He founded the higher education strategy consulting firm Bright Spot, which is now part of Buro Happold, where he is now partner and leads the higher education advisory practice. Over the past 20 years, Elliot has worked with institutions like Carnegie Mellon, MIT, and NYU, helping to improve the experience of more than a million students.

So, Elliot, thanks very much for joining us at the crack of dawn where you are in California. We very much appreciate it.

Elliot Felix:

It is great to be here. Thanks, Maddie, for inviting me, I am excited to talk about the role and the power of design. Not only we have complicated shoes, but we have some pretty good ideas and a process that can bring people together to create and implement those ideas. I am excited for today’s conversation.

Madeline Arkins:

To get us kicked off, Elliot, I was reading an article you contributed to in Urban Land from last June, “Why Some Innovation Districts Flourish While Others Fail”, which I would really encourage our listeners to check out. There are some really great case examples from across the US, where you discuss the different success factors. I am really interested, from this design element, in picking your brain on what are some of the key ingredients that you have seen can really help these kinds of spaces flourish.

Where do we, as universities, speaking as myself as a university in this case, tend to get it wrong?

Elliot Felix:

Thank you for reading and referencing that article. My co-authors, colleagues from Buro Happold, and I put our heads together and talked to a lot of our clients and looked at what we are making the differences between flourishing and failing among innovation districts.

We also relied on the great work that the GIID, the Global Institute of Innovation Districts, does in terms of benchmarking and trends. What we found was it was really five things they needed focus:

1. People need to know what it is about. It needs to be positioned based on where there is market potential, where there is community, local and regional need and also areas of strength, what your assets are. So, you have to have some kind of focus. Sometimes it is about technology, sometimes it is about healthcare, sometimes it is about even a subset of healthcare, like regenerative medicine.
2. You have to mix uses and users. You can’t have a monoculture. That is why the suburban research park is dead. Nobody wants to do that. They want to live, learn, work and play in the same place. In order to do that, you want a richer, vibrant environment that has different kinds of folks in it, doing different kinds of things: retail, housing, research, learning…
3. Space is just a container until you activate it. You have to have the staffing, and the services, and the programming that make the places come alive, that bring researchers together. It might be a way to showcase interesting things. It might be a way to demo new products. It might be services to support growing companies. They need legal, they need marketing, they need finance. They need help making a pitch deck. They need a podcast or a webinar to promote what they are doing. 
4. You need a sustainable financial model. You really have to look at the capital stack and make sure it works in the long term, and you have a mix of revenues from rents, programs and even facility rental. But also, things like tax increment financing, where, when you turn an underutilised asset into a thriving and flourishing district, you can take an increment of that increased tax revenue.
5. Once you have all those things in place, you have to have good governance to make the decisions along the way and to keep it operating where you are mixing public, private, all the different stakeholders, interested parties. I think we got lucky enough to work with the University of Minnesota recently on a project that is doing all this, called the Minnesota Innovation Exchange, that really has that focus on life sciences. The first thing they did, I think quite remarkably, was plan the public realm. So, think about the first floor and what that experience was like. That was our role working on a multidisciplinary team, thinking about the kinds of uses, the kinds of users, what are they doing, what is happening at this place that doesn’t yet exist… They also had a great governance model in place, run through their real estate foundation.

So, I think those are the five ingredients, and when they come together, places can flourish.

Madeline Arkins:

I was really interested about the tax increment funding that you mentioned in that article because the example given was from the Cortex Innovation Community in St. Louis. If anyone in the audience would like to refute this, feel free to do so, but I don’t think that there is an equivalent per se of this model in Europe. It seems quite widespread, or at least certainly more used in the US, and I really admired the equity requirements built into that funding. So, it seems that 25% of work hours had to be done by minority workers for the development of this innovation community, 5% by women and 15% by apprentices in recognised training programs, and I think it is quite rare to see that kind of requirement built into a funding yeah, a funding model.

Elliot Felix:

Yes, I think it is a great mechanism and, with the funding, can come requirements that help you reach your goals, whatever they may be.

Madeline Arkins:

Absolutely. You have done a lot of really great studies in your work at Bright Spot, as well as Buro Happold, for example the annual National Student Experience Study that, I believe, Bright Spot did. You have previously written about the gap between how fast people in society can change versus the kind of slowness that facilities and infrastructure tend to adapt to that change.

From your experience in working with all these different universities, what are some student and societal shifts that are most pressing today, and how are you seeing universities respond to that through the design of new infrastructure?

Elliot Felix:

I think there is a lot changing and when things change at different rates, that is when you create tension, or if you are Marx, that is when you create revolution. I think people often change faster than the spaces they inhabit. They adopt hybrid work, online learning, new ways of collaborating… and then the space has to catch up to them.

The converse of that is sometimes people change the space and hope that it will force people to work, learn, or live differently, and, of course, changing space alone doesn’t do that. These things need to move in lockstep, and there is a lot changing in the higher education sector. I think a lot of it comes down to the financial model.

If you think about it, a college or university has four ways to make money. They can charge tuition, they can get funded research, they can get endowment and grants through philanthropy, and they can make auxiliary income, charging for things like housing, dining and parking.

All of those are changing, right? There are fewer students and that decreases tuition. Now, in the US, there is a lot of upheaval and a lot of change going on about how research will be funded and what amounts, and how much overheads or indirect costs to support that research will be reimbursed. 

Philanthropy is going up, which is great news, and auxiliary income is certainly in flux. A lot of universities have older housing stock and there are fewer students, so they are not fully occupied, and fewer students are living on campus, which means more commuting, more doing hybrid or fully online.

So, I think a lot of it comes down to funding, and a lot of the budgeting for campuses is de facto strategic planning. Oftentimes, the strategic planning isn’t exactly a strategy. They are not really making hard choices about where to play and how to win, to use the Roger Martin framing. They are making a big tent that everything fits under, and they are saying anodyne things about innovation and excellence.

So, it really comes down to making choices about how you are going to respond to the change and, I think, that leaves us in an interesting position. We have got some research coming out about the productivity of lab space from a revenue point of view, because I think that is going to be really a focus as people try and respond.

It turns out that if you look at our sample of 111 top research institutions, what the median amount generated by the space is about $400 per square foot per year. So, you start to think if we are above or below that and what we can do to increase the productivity of our space.

Maybe it is greater density, or better support services, or rethinking the infrastructure. So, I think there is a lot of things that people can do to keep pace with those changes.

Madeline Arkins:

Yes, as you said, higher education does have a penchant for paper commitments over making some real decisions that move the needle in the direction of keeping up with that change. I will keep an eye up for that research.

Elliot Felix:

Yes. One thing that is certainly changing is the hybrid work and learning. One of my favourite examples of doing this, even before the pandemic, is a project we did at the University of Michigan (Weiser Hall), and it was what you might think of as a centre of centres.

Universities have lots of institutes and centres, they tend to all have their own events person, finance person, admin person… and that wasn’t sustainable. So, the idea was to bring all these different folks together so they can share services, ideas, spaces… And by programming it in a really flexible way and using a modular layout and getting really great quality of design, those institutes and centres were able to work together, have a more sustainable financial model, have more flexible space…

My favourite thing from when we did the post occupancy analysis is that we saved occupants an average of 4.26 hours per week in productivity.

Who doesn’t want 10% of their week back? Who doesn’t want to staff up by 10% for free? Just through better design and better programming and better governance.

So, I think folks can do this. I am hopeful.

Madeline Arkins:

Okay, I am intrigued to hear more. You also had mentioned in some of your work that oftentimes those that are most involved or who will most commonly occupy this space, be it educators or students themselves, are often quite removed from the design process itself.

How do you ensure that these spaces aren’t designed in isolation, but also aligned to these institutional strategic plans, aligned to these goals and needs?

Elliot Felix:

It is a great question, and I think this is where the toolkit and the mindset and the skillset of design thinking, or if you want to call it human-centred design, is so valuable, because you can design an inclusive process where you really think about the decisions you are making.

You design your governance process and then you go broad and deep. You find the key moments when you need to go broad and get a lot of input from a survey, from town hall meetings… And then you go deep with a group of people across a functional team, as small as you can stand it while still being representative, that you meet with on an ongoing basis.

So, the concepts, the conversation and the consensus build over time, and I think design is a great way to facilitate those kinds of conversations, to make things tangible. Often, you have to prioritise to make a project work.

Everyone is so obsessed with thinking outside the box. One of the things we do in our workshops is get people to think inside the box.

You visualise some kind of constraint and you say, “This is the budget we have, this is the space, this is the number of people, this is the staff…Your wish list is this big, but this is the box that has to fit in, conceptually, so let’s have a discussion, and we can’t leave this room until we have got different scenarios for what actually fits, so that our vision and our budget and our staff and our space all align”.

Madeline Arkins:

It really puts some guardrails and structure on a kind of process that I think people often consider is so abstract and theoretical and out of reach to those who are not designed so.

Elliot Felix:

It is really hard to imagine something that doesn’t yet exist, but there are great tools to help people do that. Personas are another one where you create archetypal users and you think not so much about their demographics, but more about their motivations and behaviours, such as, “Why would they come here? What would they do when they were there? Or how do they want to live? How do you get them to come back?”.

Then you think about the different use cases: we are here for an event, or a meeting, or a conference… Or we are here to concentrate, to collaborate… At what scale? Over what period of time? If you have a sense of the people and the kind of programs and activities, those lead you to the places you need, and then you can imagine what doesn’t yet exist.

Madeline Arkins:

It sounds like working magic happening at Buro Happold.

Elliot Felix:

It can be magic, but obviously this is hard stuff. It takes the right people at the table and bringing a whole diversity of viewpoints and experiences and perspectives. And then it takes skills facilitation to make sense of all those different perspectives, as well as bold leadership to make decisions.

Madeline Arkins:

Absolutely. I would love to ask you about a specific design example from your work, the Tepper Quadrangle Project from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Could you tell us a bit about this project? What were the core ideas and how you and your team translated this into a tangible building?

Elliot Felix:

I think the Tepper School is a great example of so many of the trends facing higher education and a really prescient case of getting out in front of them and responding to them in a really smart way. This was a business school, and I think you might think about business schools as fairly traditional, maybe a little insular, maybe a little elite, lots of wood panelling…

The vision for Tepper was, “Let’s do the opposite of that”. Let’s imagine a business school with no wood panelling, based on interconnectedness within the campus, across disciplines and departments, and externally to companies and community groups, whether it is executives coming for education or companies in the area that students are doing consulting projects for, to really ramp up experiential learning.

So, they are building skills and relationships, and to do all that, you need a more kind of porous campus, with more shared spaces. You need to be, as we were talking about with the innovation district, mixing uses and users. So, you have the undergrad, the CEO, the VP of marketing, the grad student, the faculty member and the staff member doing events programming.

The way we did that sounds like a rhetorical trick, but it was actually a major mindset shift.

We thought about it as if this wasn’t a business school building. This is a university building with a business school in it, and so the business programme was only about two thirds of the facility.

The other third is all kinds of things that speak to the whole campus and the surrounding community and companies. So, there is the Welcome Centre, for admissions and for prospective students and Families. There is the Centre for Teaching and Learning, where faculty can come to make their teaching more engaging and interactive and effective. There is a Fitness Centre and a Dining Centre that really are about quality of life and amenities for everyone. And there is the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Centre, which helps students learn the skills and mindset and tool set of entrepreneurship and even incubate companies.

And so, by bringing all of those together, it really enables that kind of connection and collaboration at a whole bunch of skills. It might be students working on a team in an active learning classroom that is really designed to help them collaborate, and not just listen to a lecture. But it might also be a team of executives coming in for executive education. It might be collaboration with a local company, with students acting as consultants.

So, it was interconnection and collaboration at lots of scales, enabled by a more kind of permeable building and lots of shared spaces.

Madeline Arkins:

How do you balance all those different user needs in one? I am assuming this relates back to the original process of human-centred design and making sure that all of those reflections and insights are heard.

Elliot Felix:

Yes. The architects, MRY architects, did a great job of taking this vision and the programme that we developed, and creating that balance so that there is a mix of shared and dedicated spaces. There are offices for departments, but also common spaces, and then, I think quite smartly, the design is really about bringing those things together.

There are common spaces such as classrooms and study spaces surrounding you, so that you have a sense of community and activities can flow from one to the other, or around and within the central atrium, which is quite active. It is not dead and empty and echoey. It is actually full of life and activity and broken down at different scales.

“That is where the food is, that is where the bathrooms are, that is where the elevators are”. So, it brings everyone out of their shell and brings them together. There is that sort of balance of public spaces, invited spaces, private spaces, big, small, shared, dedicated, specialised, generic…

I think it is like anything you want; it is like your investment portfolio or any portfolio. You are right, you want diversity. You get strength through diversity by having a mix of things, so people have choices.

Madeline Arkins:

Exactly. I would also like to ask you about another case example, just because I think it is so fascinating to hear from these practical examples where this has actually been achieved, and this kind of goal is a goal from the outset of the design process.

I wanted to ask you about the University of Rochester, iZone example. I am a previous English literature student, so anything to do with libraries is always very fascinating to me. Could you tell us a little bit about that example itself? What was the original challenge that the university was trying to solve by getting Buro Happold involved? How did your team address that?

Elliot Felix:

Absolutely. My first book was called “How to Get the Most Out of College”, and it has over a hundred tips for students to really make the most of their time in college and get the best return on investment of their time and money. People always ask, “Out of the 127 things, what is the most important one?”.

I always say, without hesitation, “Experiential learning”. It is doing real-world projects in your classes, or doing internships, co-ops, apprenticeships… where you can build skills and relationships. This was the problem that the University of Rochester was trying to solve. They realised, and we helped where we worked with them, to understand that lots of students wanted to do projects that would have social impact, cultural impact, economic impact.

But those projects didn’t find their natural home in the Entrepreneurship Centre. If you want to start a podcast, or do a performance, or do a volunteer project, you don’t need to start a company to do that. You need a team; a mentor and you need to build some skills. Maybe you need a little bit of seed funding or some inspiration.

That is what the iZone provides. It brings together spaces, services and staffing to help students conceive, work on, implement and showcase all these projects that have impact. I think experiential learning is so important, and it is one of my favourite examples of doing it.

I think that by doing it in the library, a lot of people wonder, “Why would you do this in the library?”. But I think it makes so much sense to me, because the library is common ground, and it is usually centrally located. That way it is not located in the engineering school, for example, and then, maybe, the business school students or the English literature majors don’t feel welcome.

So, I think leveraging the library as a place for students to work on projects and not just study holds great promise.

Madeline Arkins:

We know from the research and project work that UIIN has done that there is so much appetite for this kind of social impact. The challenge-based learning or internships or ways that students and researchers in social sciences and humanities can valorise or exploit their work further.

It seems like such an obvious thing to utilise these libraries to do that, so that these aren’t just isolated endeavours to do that.

I also wanted to ask about future proofing these spaces. We talked about how fast society changes. So, how can universities plan agile, flexible infrastructure that stays adaptable to changes both in technology, pedagogy, and as well as the diversity of students that are now coming into higher education?

Elliot Felix:

I think people can do three things. I think they can get a better crystal ball, they can create more flexible spaces, and they can think creatively about their funding.

On the crystal ball front, that is really where design thinking can help, because you are imagining how this thing could be used and how that use could change over time.

I think the flexibility sometimes comes in simple ways. If you are doing active learning classrooms, the tables and chairs should be on wheels, right? So, you can configure the same room in a U, in clusters, in rows, two sides to have a debate… Also, through that diversity of spaces that we were talking about.

And then, I think the way that you finance projects can really help, because what happens oftentimes is people put all their investment in the upfront capital and then they don’t have the ongoing funds to operate it or to make changes.

Every time I hear of people doing something differently, they are just wildly successful. Take the Tepper School at Carnegie Mellon as an example. They didn’t fit out all the space; they actually just shelled some of the space. So, it had an envelope, and it had systems, but no walls or partitions or anything. Then, they waited a couple years to figure out how to use that, who would grow into it, and that gave them some flexibility.

Another example would be the Charles Library at Temple. What they did is the state funded most of the project, but then they used private philanthropy to create an operating endowment for the project, so that they can do programming and staffing and signage and whatever those kinds of small operational tweaks are for, whatever furniture and technology that helps the building adapt.

Madeline Arkins:

These are really useful tips and also make so much sense in that you want adaptable furniture. Don’t leave room for adaptation in how you design spaces.

Elliot, I know your book is coming out in June, “The Connected College: Leadership Strategies for Student Success”, so we will watch with interest for that to come out. Where can people find out more about you or get in touch? What is this book about? Give us a little final blurb before I bid us adieu.

Elliot Felix:

I think the best two great sources are www.burohappold.com, which has great case studies and information about our consulting practice. Also, in my spare time I write and speak and host a podcast about student success all under the umbrella of the Connected College, and people can find that at www.elliotfelix.com.

Those who subscribe to the Connected College newsletter get a discount on the book, so I encourage folks to do that and to keep in touch. I love talking about this stuff. I love helping students succeed and helping institutions with the strategy, the space, the services, the staffing, the systems to make that happen.

And I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you today, and the work that you are doing.

Madeline Arkins:

Thanks, Elliot, I appreciate it. These 30 minutes always go especially fast, but particularly so when there are so many interesting case examples, so I appreciate it. Nice to meet you, Elliot. See you again. Best of luck.

Ready for more?

If you are interested in learning more about how a well-design space can help fostering meaningful connections, head now to our podcast episode Beyond the lecture hall: Creating collaborative learning spaces. In it, Brent Miller from HED shares insights on working with higher education institutions to design spaces that foster collaboration, prepare students for industry careers, and integrate sustainability.

And our case study collection on How to build thriving innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems explores how to create environments where innovation can thrive by providing the necessary resources, support, and networks for entrepreneurs and businesses to develop and scale their ideas.

Stay tuned for the next episode on this series and don’t forget to follow us on your preferred podcast platform!