MK: Yes! We originally set up the R&D lab in 2015 when we started working on our first ground-up projects. Up to that point, we had only been doing tenant improvements in existing buildings. Google’s leadership wanted to take the opportunity to really push the envelope of what is possible and try to achieve the company’s north star ambitious aspirations. Some of those aspirations include studying how we could design and construct buildings that don’t create any carbon, that produce their own energy, that is net positive water, that can be really healthy for people, that can be highly adaptable for decades to come, and be scalable to millions. This is, of course, challenging to do because to be scalable it needs to be cost-effective and cost no more than traditional buildings, and not take any more time, and not have any more risk. That is nearly an impossible problem, especially for individual single buildings to tackle alone. However, if we look across our portfolio and pipeline of multiple buildings and campuses, we have a shot.

We set up the R&D lab as a way to both study what might be possible, with a lot of trial and error, to see if we can utilize the scale of our entire portfolio instead of just one project as a way to move from what is on the market today (lower left corner of a graph) to our north star aspirations (upper right corner of a graph). Can we help to move all of our projects up higher along that trajectory? That’s really why we set up the R&D lab, to try to help move us along in ways that single projects could not, where we can do research and development in advance of a project starting.,. For example, are there ways that we could cover our entire buildings with solar panels that are beautiful, efficient and have a meaningful return on investment? And if that doesn’t exist on the market yet, how do we do this?

The kind of research and testing required for materials and products that are not yet on the market – but could possibly be solid solutions in the future – is a near impossibility for an individual project to do while also hitting their budget and schedule.  Our R+D group strives to do that work in advance for initiatives that seem promising for solving our toughest problems and highest priorities. We research and talk to all sorts of people and look at all sorts of companies and see what products they might be developing that are not on the market yet. If there is a promising solution that we test is working and produces the results we are striving for, is there a way to help bring that to market sooner?

In a nutshell, that’s really why we have the R&D lab, to try to help move toward our lofty north star aspirations. As we come up with some of those solutions and we’ve tested them, then we can start to offer them to Google individual projects. And some of those things only make sense when you have the scale across our projects. You can only get the price point where they can be scalable when we do it on ten buildings versus just one.