Digital innovation is transforming the ways in which buildings are made to fit the needs of users

There are those who describe digital innovation as a wave. This view suggests that once it subsides, everything will resolve to a new and predictable normal.

Others, however, ourselves included, view internet-driven digitisation as a tide that is in eternal and powerful motion.

This movement will never settle and will constantly throw up possibilities for new property wealth generation, and for the continual sidelining and displacement of that whose time has passed.

More importantly, digitisation creates a new world in which the value of data about a property will grow, because property, like all other businesses touched by the internet, is now an information business.

Against those equipped with it, no matter how good their instincts, those commercial owners and developers lacking user insight and data will increase risk in whatever redevelopment they undertake.

The uses and value of that data will grow in value not least because digitisation can connect minds of users to tell those of curious providers what is special and distinctive about the needs of those who will occupy their properties.

And once they can derive a qualitative knowledge profile of those using every property, and its human requirements are understood, experiments can be run to test for new ways forward and new results.

One thing is for sure. If you have no proprietary knowledge of your user’s needs, your marketing risk is amplified.

Against this, when it is organised to collaborate towards a declared purpose, the socially internet literate, connected, post-Facebook mind is now the most powerful human-to-human force for business and property transformation the world has ever seen.

Increasingly, it will reveal new data, insights and possibilities suppliers never anticipated.

And that capacity is now everywhere. It is accessible. It exists in everyone you know and in every employee in every company and every sentient property user.

And because it is possible to do anything better when we work and create together, in collaboration, when that knowledge is focused to expose hitherto unknown thinking and ideas, its generative forces will transform every community, and every environment in which they live and work.

This knowledge can bring owners closer to their customers, and, most importantly, if used well, give them superior qualitative marketing insights and new product ideas.

Because we are pioneers in recognising, and have experience of using this new force commercially, we have been paid to write and publish on it, first here, in the August 2019 print edition of FM (Facility Management) magazine, and subsequently, here, in the February 2020 issue of Indesign magazine, on its specific applications to shaping the workplace of the future.

We can make your own teams smarter by using this capacity to help them learn to ask better questions and get inside the minds of your users in a way other practices can’t.

We can help you take into consideration as iterative briefing inputs every particular user quirk or opinion to identify if it is just an outlier or a trend to which you should pay attention and adjust.

It is not entirely a coincidence that those businesses that get closer to customers typically boast of better financial returns. (Just ask Amazon.)

Allow us to help you fit your properties better to your users’ needs in ways others can’t, to help your business better understand and get closer to those customers of its own.