In the symposium's second discussion, Future of Collaborations in Offsite Construction, we explored how offsite construction can scale only if its players collaborate across legal, financial, manufacturing, and design silos.

The CfOC asked:

• What does it take to shift from Engineer-to-Order (ETO) to Configure-to-Order (CTO)?
• How can contracts, code, and insurance evolve to support productized construction?
• Can the industry standardize without becoming generic?

…and the lively discussion was all over the place. Some of our key takeaways were:

• The bottlenecks aren’t just technical—they’re legal, financial, and cultural.
• Modular success depends on aligning stakeholders early—from investors to inspectors.
• Data-sharing and liability clarity are essential to unlocking true collaboration.
• Inspection could be productized and standardized—if we design for it.
• We need new proving grounds, new roles, and new rules to move from one-off builds to true product platforms.

At the symposium, it was clear: this group is not just making buildings, we’re building the infrastructure for a whole new industry. Reach out to the CfOC for more notes or to join this work.

#OffsiteConstruction #Modular #Collaboration #CTO #ConstructionInnovation #DesignManufacturing

The feedback the CfOC got (after the discussion) was just as exciting at the 40-person roundtable. Here's a sample:

“What great news – that folks are working on a location and funding for NY State testing. Our industry needs to reward innovation in development in ways like this! The symposium highlighted that each represented company needs developers to take a programmatic approach to new methods, so it’s exciting to think this can be incorporated into any version of the State’s vision for the NY Lab. From our experience, programmatic initiatives (at the city/state level) are a key way to depoliticize such an effort. It would be a first-in-the-nation opportunity to see the state dedicate multiple parcels of land to become a part of a state lab, and within each parcel, the state incentivizes testing/validating a specific hypothesis that it collects data around. This is the best way to demonstrate success – with case studies pointing developers to innovation that has indeed been tested.” 

- Apoorva Pasricha (Cloud Apartments)

“The problem we’re solving for is a better requirement for simplicity. All these systems have to work together for functionality. We want to standardize the interfaces between all our products to reach that goal.We’ve seen folks try to enforce that vision by imposing it within an entire ecosystem that they own. That’s top-heavy and difficult to keep profitable. The CfOC is trying top create a de-centralized ecosystem, where stakeholders can tackle assembly constraints and limitations as like-minded teams – not employees. This is the way to a vibrant US offsite industry.” 

– Matt Ford (NY Tech School of Architecture)