The Business Innovation seminar last week was intense in a good way. It was clear, structured, and very hands‑on: we moved from identifying opportunities to business models, validation, basic unit economics, and finally pitching a “venture starting package” built around our own projects. For someone coming from architecture and material research, it was helpful to translate messy ideas into something that can actually be tested and explained to people outside the studio.
At the same time, the overall frame of the course was very much “how to evaluate opportunities and build scalable ventures”, with a toolbox coming from lean startup, product–market fit, unit economics, business angels and venture capital. That logic makes sense for many projects, but it also left me wondering where the space is for businesses that don’t want to chase high growth, unicorn status, or aggressive scale. I missed a discussion on degrowth, on companies that deliberately stay small, and on how to design ventures that are successful because they stabilize a territory, not because they expand endlessly.
My own proposal sits exactly in this tension. It works with local materials and what is usually treated as trash – soils, organic fibers, leftover fragments from construction – and explores how these can become building elements that carry structure, regulate indoor climate, and reconnect architecture to land management. The project wants to respond to several pressures at once: carbon‑heavy construction, undervalued rural resources, and landscapes that are more vulnerable to fire and abandonment. The seminar helped me clarify who might pay for such a thing, how to test basic assumptions, and what an economically sustainable version could look like.
But the more I developed it with the tools from the course, the more a second set of questions appeared in the background: How big should something like this really become? What is the right scale if the aim is to support local economies, reduce waste, and improve ecological resilience? Can a business be considered innovative if it is designed to be replicable and modest, instead of optimised for rapid growth and investor returns? Those are questions the syllabus doesn’t yet address, but they feel central for anyone trying to build new work around local materials, care and limits rather than around extraction and speed.
