Jordan Ostapchuk
“How can design influence capital allocation in private, long-term infrastructure investments?”
As the Infrastructure Vice President of Strategy and Innovation at OMERS, Jordan Ostapchuk drives investment strategy and innovation for the firm’s infrastructure platform. Prior to joining OMERS, Jordan advised on global strategy, communication, and innovation initiatives in real estate. He has honed a career building expertise in analyzing and communicating capital investment.
Jordan is now a Ph.D. candidate at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Institute of Design, investigating how design can influence capital allocation in private long-term infrastructure investment to drive value creation.
Why focus your PhD research on capital allocation?
Fundamentally, capital and capital allocation, is one of the most powerful forces shaping the environment. You can make the case that it's on par with climate change. In fact, it's intimately related to climate change, but nobody's really thinking about it in such a way. And if you think about design as a profession set on transforming our environments and our world - why is it not integrated with capital allocation at all? Where are the barriers? Where can we find common ground? How can we bring these two communities together? It's a huge opportunity for design as it attempts to make positive change. One of the biggest levers out there that's heretofore untouched is capital allocation… it can shape entire ecosystems in a way that would otherwise be impossible.
What types of infrastructures or platforms are you most excited to redesign, reconsider, reimagine?
I think design is missing the tools to impact markets, or create entirely new markets and asset classes. [Design is missing the] understanding of how investors think, what makes a good investment., It's about moving the good ideas that are already flowing upstream to the macro level to say, how can you design new asset classes that then unlock all of this stuff that opens the door for designers? We already know how to do it at the micro level, but need the resources and the capital to actually do it at scale.