Beginning in January after a call from now President Xi Jinping, China has launched a “Clean Your Plate” (“光盘行动“) initiative in an effort to reduce food waste. This campaign focuses on zero waste when dining in restaurants, encouraging diners to order less and take any leftover food home. Over 70% of all garbage in China is [...]

As China’s senior living industry takes shape, one of the more important triggers that will indicate the sector’s development is the role of institutional capital and whether it begins to selectively deploy in the country.  Admittedly, China has fairly deep capital reserves – in particular those available to traditional institutional investors such as life insurance [...]

I encourage you all to watch the entirety of this Vimeo presentation by pioneering hospital architect David Rhodes, who now runs a consultancy (DavLan Consulting) after retiring from a forty year career in health care design. The talk’s title sounds technical, but the video is more a memoir of Mr. Rhodes’ work designing hospitals in [...]

There is a lot of asset capacity coming on-line in China’s senior housing.  No one really doubts this.  What many of us are concerned about are the whether the operating models and care practices are evolving in concert with the enormous new investments being made in new properties and communities.  Among the many challenges early [...]

As third world countries such as Myanmar open to FDI and their economies begin to grow, one of the first questions MNC companies seek to understand are the spending preferences of the respective country’s emerging middle class.  In countries like China, repeated studies of consumer spending have found that one of the highest priorities for [...]

This summer I am renting an office at an Ann Arbor based start-up incubator of sorts. This is technically Rubicon Strategy Group’s first branch office outside of Seattle. The space, a former archery range, is best described as a very large architecture studio.  My table is directly in front of a scale model of what [...]