Radical Innovation Awards Ceremony 2023

In 2020, the jury responsible for evaluating anonymous submissions, had chosen Luxury Frontiers and Populous to compete. Unbeknownst to the jury, they once again picked the same companies from a pool of 60 submissions. It was an unexpected rematch! Joel Mbala-Nkanga from Populous and Graeme Labe from Luxury Frontiers presented their concepts to the audience, followed by a “shark-tank-style” question and answer session about the creativity of their vision, feasibility, design aspects, and potential to impact the industry. The live audience votes were combined with the record-breaking 1,500+ public votes. The announcement of the winners took place at the formal dinner that followed the presentations.

The competition awarded five winners across four categories: The Professional Project winner was The Turtle Bungalow submitted by Graeme Labe, Juan Cloete, Rick Van Heerden, and Idalina Silva Grech-Cumbo from Luxury Frontiers. The Student Project winner was The Rocky Hotel submitted by Nadia Shumeeva, Student at TiArch Studio, Kazan State University of Architecture and Engineering. Nadia will receive $5,000 and the opportunity to apply for an Assistantship and full Scholarship from one of the three Radical University Partners. In the product category, The Gourd Project submitted by Jun Aizaki from Crème Architecture and Design was the Professional Product winner. The jurors found the Student Product submissions so impressive that they decided to award two winners: PulpaTronics by Barna Soma Biro, Chloe So, Jingyan Chen, Rui Ma from Imperial College London & Royal College of Art and H+S Health Spring by Wen Shin Zeng, Sin-Yu Lin, Yun-Jhen Wu, and Yin-Chi Lu from Ming Chi University of Technology. Click here to view the winners from each year.

On Tuesday, October 24th a distinguished assembly of 100 industry visionaries, designers, architects, and real estate moguls convened at the prestigious New Museum for the 17th Annual Radical Innovation Award Ceremony and Dinner. Eran Chen, Founder and Executive Director of ODA led the evening for the second consecutive year as Master of Ceremonies.

Guests gathered at the New Museum's Sky Room for welcome cocktails, enjoying a 360-degree view of Manhattan. The presentation commenced promptly at 6:00 pm, unveiling two new additions to the regular programming. Traditionally, product winners were not physically present at the event, but this year, jurors offered feedback and presented awards to the winners on stage. Additionally, Radical Innovation included a dedicated section for the student project finalists. As part of the ongoing commitment to fostering student growth, project videos were created and prominently featured on the voting website and during the event, where they competed for the public vote. It was time for the main event, and the two professional finalists took the stage, but they had previously crossed paths on the Radical stage once before.

Radical Innovation is produced by The Hardy Group with the incredible support from sponsoring companies, DFL Legal, SUMMA International AHLA Foundation, Beyer Brown & Associates, Continental Contractors, Cooper Carry, DLR Group, Florim, Benjamin West, Chartres Lodging Group, Crown Creative, Hospitality Logistics Intl., JG Neukomm, ODA, Rivur, SHaD, Studio 11 Design, Shawmut, and Crown Creative. Radical Innovation education partners are UNLV School of Architecture, UNLV Black Fire Innovation, the University of Illinois School of Architecture, NYUSPS Jonathan M. Tisch Center of Hospitality.