Sarah Outcault, UC Davis’s Market Transformation Research Director, joined international researchers and local experts at the Buildings4People symposium in Buenos Aires to explore how putting people at the center of the built environment can advance equity, affordability, and climate resilience. Her presentation, “Socio-Technical Misalignment: Why Building Innovations Stall in the Real World,” drew on a dozen field and market studies to explain why promising technologies stall—even when the engineering works. Highlighting examples from heat pumps to indoor air quality monitoring in childcare centers, she examined three barriers: misunderstood consumer priorities, institutional complexities, and entrenched habits. Her central message: successful innovation takes more than technical performance and financial incentives. It requires aligning technologies with the needs and constraints of the people who choose, install, manage, and use them.