Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes

Why organisations work with Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes

• She turns innovation from a hoped-for outcome into a designable practice, by treating the interactions that produce ideas as something with a structure that can be planned and built for.
• Her perspective sits outside the usual management consultancy frame. As a working architect who founded AKKA in Amsterdam after five years at Rem Koolhaas’s OMA, she brings spatial and design discipline to questions that boards usually approach through HR and culture programmes.
• She has translated her thesis into a published method. Architecting Interaction: How to Innovate through Interactions sets out a four-stage process (Appreciate, Kernel, Kickstart, Adaptation) that organisations can hold against their own innovation efforts.
• Her client list spans corporate, regulatory and public sector users of the same method, including DHL, Guardian Glass, Saint Gobain, the European Commission and several Dutch ministries, which gives her examples that translate across audience types.
• Through EdenMountain, the venture she co-founded around Enterprise Non-Operating Rights, she is also fluent in the commercial and capital-strategy side of how dormant assets, including IP, get turned into operating value.

Biography highlights

• Founder and CEO of AKKA Architects, Amsterdam, a studio specialised in spaces for creativity, collaboration and learning.
• Five years at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA), working under Rem Koolhaas, before founding AKKA in 2012.
• Author of Architecting Interaction: How to Innovate through Interactions (BIS Publishers, ISBN 9789463450478).
• Co-Founder and CEO of EdenMountain, the venture pioneering Enterprise Non-Operating Rights (ENORs) as a new asset class.
• Multiple TEDx talks, including TEDxBelfastWomen, TEDxYouth@HNLBilthoven, and TEDxAmsterdamED.
• Professional degree in Architecture with high honours from the American University of Beirut; winner of the Lebanese Order of Architects “Venice-Beirut” competition.

Biography

Most innovation programmes start with a brief and a budget. They rarely start with a clear-eyed look at the interactions the organisation actually needs more of, and the contexts that would produce them. That gap, between the desire for innovation and the design discipline that produces it, is the territory Stephanie Akkaoui Hughes has been working in for over a decade.

Her route to it is unusual. Trained at the American University of Beirut and then at Rem Koolhaas’s Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, she spent five years inside one of the most intellectually demanding studios in global architecture before founding her own practice, AKKA Architects, in Amsterdam in 2012. AKKA designs workplaces, public buildings, and educational and residential spaces for clients such as DHL, Guardian Glass, Saint Gobain, the European Commission and a range of Dutch ministries.

Her book, Architecting Interaction: How to Innovate through Interactions, sets out the argument that runs through her practice and her speaking. Innovation is produced by interactions; interactions are produced by contexts; and contexts can be deliberately designed. The book lays out a four-stage method, Appreciate, Kernel, Kickstart and Adaptation, that organisations can apply to workplaces, programmes and ways of working.

More recently, as Co-Founder and CEO of EdenMountain, she has extended the same instinct, that value is unlocked by structuring what already exists, into capital markets, building a marketplace for Enterprise Non-Operating Rights that lets companies monetise dormant intellectual property without taking on debt or diluting equity.

Key speaking topics

• Architecting Interaction
• Workplace design for collaboration and learning
• Innovation as a managed discipline
• Spatial and organisational context design
• Cross-disciplinary innovation
• Designing for cultures of creativity
• New asset classes and the monetisation of dormant value
• Entrepreneurial leadership across architecture and fintech

Ideal for

• CHROs, CPOs and heads of workplace responsible for offices and ways of working that have to produce more than seat efficiency.
• Heads of innovation, R&D and strategy who own innovation as an outcome but lack a discipline that connects the workplace, the team design and the creative process.
• Real estate, facilities and capital project leaders briefing or commissioning new buildings, refurbishments or campus strategies.
• Founders, scale-up CEOs and corporate venture leads interested in turning dormant intellectual property into a structured asset class.

Audience outcomes

• A working definition of innovation as a property of designed interactions, not a property of individual talent.
• A four-stage method, drawn from her book, for diagnosing and rebuilding the contexts in which collaboration and creativity are meant to happen.
• Specific examples from corporate, regulatory and public sector clients that translate the method into recognisable organisational settings.
• A second, sharper lens on capital strategy for audiences interested in EdenMountain and the ENOR asset class.
• A vocabulary that lets workplace, HR, innovation and real estate functions argue for the same outcome in the same terms.