The World of Urban-x
A/D/O by Mini’s in-house accelerator is investing in future cities one game-changing start-up at a time. By Elizabeth Pagliacolo
Launched nearly three years ago in New York City by BMW Mini, the creative hub A/D/O by Mini and its start-up accelerator Urban-x are the automotive company’s bet on the future: city-focused tech and design incubators that give it first dibs on potentially game-changing ideas. But what kind of real-world innovations have been spawned to date? To find out, Azure sent executive editor ELIZABETH PAGLIACOLO to A/D/O by Mini’s Brooklyn headquarters, where she was impressed by a trio of especially promising developments, including a cure for “road cancer”
When I arrive at A/D/O by Mini in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, I am struck by how the squat, full-block building communicates itself as something old yet new. The graffitimarked brickwork is of a piece with the (rapidly gentrifying) industrial neighbourhood, but the patio is shaped as if someone has sliced off a triangular wedge from the one-storey volume, providing a jolt of the novel and exciting.
It’s a sun-showery May afternoon during Nycxdesign and I’m here to learn about A/D/O and specifically its Urban-x accelerator. But I also want to experience the eminently Instagrammable installation in the courtyard. Called Urban Imprint, it’s composed of two terracotta-coloured layers – a floor and a ceiling – connected by a hidden system of steel springs and pulleys. When you step onto the floor, your feet sink into the “ground” and the portion of ceiling above your head lifts like a dome, its tile-like modules separating to bring glimpses of the city into view. The artist Nassia Inglessis and her outfit, Studio INI of London and Athens, have in effect transmuted the rigid materials of urban environments – the modular, terracotta-like surfaces are, in fact, made of a mix of rubber and concrete – into a malleable, human-centric palette that reacts and responds to an individual’s movement. It symbolizes much of what goes on at A/D/O, where the city is being reimagined one innovation at a time.
Opened in January 2017, A/D/O by Mini is many things. It is a physical place that emphasizes placemaking itself: The 2,140-square-metre brick building was a warehouse before locally based narchitects “remixed” the interior spaces, reclad the facade with the original, graffiti-marked bricks and, in the atrium, installed a skylight that reflects and refracts the Manhattan and Brooklyn skylines. It’s a creative space for designers: a co-working spot that houses artist quarters, a fabrication shop for designers-in-residence and a communal workspace with free Wi-fi. And it’s open to
the public: Locals can pick up a book at the meticulously curated on-site bookshop, attend year-round programming that includes exhibitions and talks focused on A/D/O’S ambitious research projects (a multi-part exploration of border cities, co-developed by Belgian critic–curator Jan Boelen and French designer–curator Charlotte Dumoncel d’argence, is currently in the works) or grab a meal at the soon-to-open Japanese restaurant Rule of Thirds. “The building is really about how to combine all of these modules under one roof,” says Nate Pinsley, global managing director at A/D/O by Mini. “It’s curiosity that drives this place.”
Perhaps most significantly, A/D/O is the experimental hub of BMW Mini. It takes its initials from Amalgamated Drawing Office, the secret team that BMW set up in 1959 to design the first Mini in response to the fuel crisis of the day. It’s in this spirit that the A/D/O moniker has been revived to launch innovations intended to improve urban life. The brains behind the initiative is Esther Bahne, president of Mini Business Innovation, who joined the company in 2013 and also established its other high-minded forays into design, including Mini Living. And if A/D/O is BMW Mini’s experimental hub, the Urban-x accelerator is the humming engine at the heart of it, residing in a glass-fronted open-concept office that, unlike all other aspects of A/D/O, is off limits. Inside, up to 10 urban-innovation-minded start-ups are brought together every six months to spend 20 weeks developing their products, researching their future customers and practising their pitches to potential investors.
The hypothesis at the centre of the A/D/O experiment is this: Cities used to be designed around cars, but the future will look much different. And if BMW Mini is to remain relevant, it must invest in ideas that will inform – and possibly shape – the city of the future. To that end, the brand is also building co-living spaces in Shanghai, Berlin and elsewhere in New York that combine residential concepts prototyped by Mini Living with the public-private playground essence of A/D/O’S Brooklyn HQ. Soon, the Greenpoint location will be but a node in an evolving network of bricks-and-mortar testing grounds for urban experimentation. For now, though, it is the only place with an Urban-x accelerator.
“Urban-x helps us not just to find answers but – because it’s early days – also to frame the right questions,” says Bahne. Urban-x selects start-ups working in areas that correspond to the accelerator’s seven verticals: built environment and real estate, public health and safety, infrastructure and industry, energy and grid, govtech and civic solutions, transportation and mobility, and food, waste and water. “One of the big questions we ask about start-ups,” says Micah Kotch, Urban-x’s managing director, “is, ‘Do we think that this product can scale to 100 cities? Over the next five years?’”
WORKING WITH CITIES – RATHER THAN AGAINST THEM – IS CENTRAL TO URBAN-X
Start-ups receive a combined US$150,000 in seed money from Urban-x and its venture partner, Urban Us. “We have skin in the game,” says Kotch. “We hold equity going toward debt in exchange for investing in each team that we work with.” In the first part of the program, focused on customer and product development, start-ups fine-tune their product with an in-house team, from UI and UX designers to machine-learning experts. The second half of the program is concentrated on fundraising; it culminates in a “Demo Day” that sharpens companies’ pitching skills for subsequent one-to-one meetings with potential angel or institutional investors in places like Palo Alto, San Francisco and New York. “It takes talking to 80 to 100 investors in order to close with five investors and a couple of million dollars,” says
Liz Sisson, COO of Urban Us and program manager of Urban-x. In fact, Urban-x boasts a Us$10-million average investment for each company it has unleashed onto the world and is now onto its sixth cohort.
The accelerator primes start-ups to pitch to two types of end users: government agencies and private businesses (B2G and B2B). While some of its alumni are creating straightforward products that could also appeal directly to consumers (Treau, for instance, is launching an energy-efficient air conditioning unit), others are prototyping technologies with more pronounced governance and privacy implications. These include Swiftera, which enlists a weather balloon to take super-high-resolution photographs of urban centres for any number of purposes, such as “if a city wanted imagery for understanding parking issues, or if they wanted to figure out how many buildings have solar [power], or how people move around,” explains Sisson. “You can talk about insurance [applications] as well – for instance, if an insurance company wants imagery of an accident, or if accidents keep occurring in this one area.”
Sisson distinguishes the types of innovation that Urban-x and Urban Us are championing from the move-fast-and-break-things tech companies of the recent past. Uber and Airbnb, for instance, have notoriously asserted their presence in cities first, forcing local authorities and regulating bodies to catch up with them after the fact. “They were more like, ‘Government, get out of my way because
I want to privatize all of this,’” says Sisson. “They probably could have had conversations early on to better understand the communities that are impacted by the technology.”
In other words, working with cities – rather than against them – is central to Urban-x. “We have a really deep and long-standing relationship with a number of folks who are active within city landscape, whether those are municipal officials or agency heads or people from the private sector who work within cities,” says Kotch, who used to be director of the New York Prize and strategic advisor for innovation at the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. This focus is affirmed by Sisson. “Total disclaimer: Almost everybody on the Urban Us team has worked in a government function of some sort,” she says. “Frankly, we’re all pro-government.”
Because of Urban-x’s connection to civic bodies, its alums are poised to provide game-changing solutions, especially when it comes to climate change. (Turn the page for a primer on three of the most promising start-ups.) And governments need them. “The State of New York just passed this incredibly ambitious policy to get to net zero by 2050,” says Kotch. “That’s a lot of entrepreneurial opportunity there.” a-d-o.com, urban-x.com