Stanford and C&W Team Up for Tech Program

PALO ALTO, CA—Cushman & Wakefield has a new partnership with Stanford University’s Disruptive Technology and Digital Cities program, a collaboration aimed at identifying, developing and launching transformative technologies within the commercial real estate space. The partnership brings together Stanford’s academic and institutional resources and Cushman & Wakefield’s industry-specific knowledge and expertise.

The shared focus will be to assess emerging technologies and societal trends, with the goal of leveraging these findings to develop practical applications in areas such as 3D visual modeling, property valuation, smart building operations and advanced data analytics. Cushman & Wakefield Americas CEO Shawn Mobley said the partnership with Stanford and think tanks is an important component of the firm’s larger innovation and technology strategy.

“This collaboration with Stanford University underscores Cushman & Wakefield’s commitment to bringing new and cutting-edge technologies and insights to the commercial real estate industry, our people and our clients,” Mobley said.

Michael Steep, executive director of the Digital Cities program and a Stanford adjunct professor, added that the partnership will also assist Cushman & Wakefield in identifying emerging technologies that could alter its practices or operating model.

“Cushman & Wakefield will work with the best and brightest Stanford University faculty and PhDs on a wide variety of projects that will lead to new innovations and best practices across real estate,” Steep said.

As part of the partnership, Cushman & Wakefield leaders will meet regularly with Stanford faculty and staff to discuss program updates and share insights or developments across industries. Cushman & Wakefield will become actively involved in several current research efforts underway within the program, including studies on 3D modeling, advanced materials and mobility.

Existing corporate members of the program include Amazon Web Services, Bechtel, Booz Allen Hamilton, CIBC, Cityzenith, Daikin, Deloitte, Hitachi, Microsoft, Prologis, Royal Bank of Canada and Visa.

The relationship constitutes yet another critical technology partnership for Cushman & Wakefield, which views partnerships as a key component of its overall technology strategy. Since 2017, the company has engaged in strategic partnerships with startup accelerators and venture capital firms, including MetaProp NYC, Plug and Play, and Chicago’s 1871.

“Our investment in technology through partnerships provides us with insights that help us to better advise our clients on how to manage their property,” said Melanie Kirkwood Ruiz, Cushman & Wakefield Americas CIO. “These relationships enable us to use lessons drawn from the best innovators across several disciplines and provide us first hand access to next generation tools designed for the future.”

Stanford’s Global Projects Center Digital Cities research initiative creates a focused research effort. It brings together cross-discipline expertise including data analytics, institutional investment on urban sustainability, and explores how emerging technologies will change the ways to think about business model development for government and enterprises engaged in digital cities. Collaboration with corporate affiliates ensures market connection, validation and new ways of transforming disruption into competitive advantage.

The Stanford GPC affiliate program in Digital Cities is one of the first programs of its kind in the United States. Its goal is to fundamentally change the way governments and companies operate as the world moves toward truly digitized urban centers, by harnessing focused research, commercial opportunity, and new ways of thinking about governance and sustainability.

The benefits of the affiliate program include early insights about emerging technologies and new business models: privacy preserving analytics, predictive analytics, AI machine intelligence, meta materials, autonomous vehicles, Lidar and other technologies, GlobeSt.com learns.

“This is the first year of the Digital Cities program and Stanford sought to curate a list of corporate partners that were at the forefront of technology in their respective industries,” Ruiz tells GlobeSt.com.  “Cushman & Wakefield is the exclusive real estate services representative which creates excellent opportunities for collaboration with the other corporate partners that include Amazon web services, Prologis and Microsoft.”

Ruiz says the partnership with Stanford rounds out Cushman & Wakefield’s three other strategic partnerships. Its venture capital relationships with Metaprop and Plug and Play cover seed-stage to growth-stage real estate tech companies and a partnership with an academic university such as Stanford complimented its partner-first innovation strategy.

“The Stanford program gives Cushman & Wakefield access to research on cutting-edge technologies for digital cities and real estate from big data applications to new building materials,” Ruiz tells GlobeSt.com. “This helps us see beyond the start-up world into what technologies will be changing our cities, and the spaces we live and work in everyday, and how Cushman & Wakefield can position ourselves within that future.”