Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) puts the owner, architect, and general contractor under a single multi-party agreement with shared financial risk and reward. The team agrees on a target cost. If the team beats the target, savings are shared. If the team exceeds the target, losses are also shared (often capped at the design and contracting fees). The structure aligns incentives across parties that traditional delivery puts in adversarial positions.
IPD requires high trust, mature partners, and contracts the parties have actually read. It works best on complex projects with high coordination demands (hospitals, advanced manufacturing) where the cost of misalignment is large. It does not work on commodity work where the owner just wants the lowest price. Tools that support IPD include: integrated BIM models, collocated project teams, weekly cross-discipline coordination meetings, and open-book accounting visible to all parties.