In 2010, Perkins&Will launched Innovation Incubator, a program that supports design-focused research by providing micro-grants of money and time. Open to everyone at the firm, the program provides grant recipients 40 hours of company time, to be spent over six months, and $1,000 toward expenses (or 80 hours and $2,000 for teams).
Anyone at the firm can apply for a grant during one of two annual calls for entries. Proposals are shared internally during an open comment period, and everyone at the firm gets to review and comment on the proposals. This encourages supportive discourse and community-building and builds the firm’s global innovation network. Then, the firm’s Committee, comprised of a diversity of perspectives―currently Leigh Christy, Mariana Giraldo, Tyrone Marshall, Jon Penndorf, Matt Petermann, Adriana Portela, Kimberly Seigel, and Mark Walsh―makes the final selections.
After a round of completed projects, the Committee makes a concerted effort to meaningfully connect Incubator grantees with practices, studios, and project teams that might benefit from the research.
To date, the program has funded 319 grants—the result of 867 applications from 25 studios over 26 grant cycles.
You can learn more about the work of the Innovation Incubator through stories of key projects: https://innovation.perkinswill.com/. The firm’s publicly available research from the last nine years can be found at https://research.perkinswill.com/, and its Research Journals are available for free at https://perkinswill.com/research/. Perkins&Will has also developed a publicly available precautionary list to support designer selections of healthier building materials: https://transparency.perkinswill.com/.
