Innovation in the construction industry

The construction industry needs to work collaboratively and pool knowledge in order to capture innovation, says Director of Constructing Excellence, Peter Cunningham.

"Founded almost 10 years ago, in the wake of the Egan and Latham reports, Constructing Excellence has been actively campaigning within the UK construction industry for more research and innovation," says Director of Constructing Excellence, Peter Cunningham.

"As an instrumental player in improving best practice techniques, we are now able to confidently refute critics who say the industry lacks innovation."

Capturing innovation

Cunningham poses a hypothetical situation that typifies the challenges facing the construction industry: "Imagine you've just finished a project on a prison," he says, "and then the next day the project is a hotel. Can you really take the learning from that prison project and transfer it to something so different?"

It's a common dilemma in the construction industry: how to 'capture' knowledge and transfer it from one job to another. Another practitioner may well know the answer however in this current competitive market, who is going to share it with you?

This is the issue the government hit upon when it commissioned Sir John Egan's report, 'Rethinking Construction', in 1998.
On Egan's recommendation, the government created Constructing Excellence: a members' forum, with regional offices across the UK, designed to pool expertise within the construction industry.

One of Egan's main findings was that failures in quality and safety in construction were often the result of adversarial working patterns. These patterns, in turn, were the result of the way contracts were being procured.

"In the late 90s, most of the public sector was procuring on a one-off basis, with single tender agreements, mainly based on cost rather than value," Cunningham explains.
"Now the public sector is starting to procure its work more innovatively and collaboratively.

Rather than single tender agreements, they're entering into collaborative frameworks, working in partnership with their supply chain."

It's a small innovation - changing the nature of contracts. Yet the impact has been huge.

Collective wisdom

"One of the resounding issues facing our sector," says Cunningham, "is that a number of organisations come together in a supply chain, they work on a project, and then as soon as it's finished they walk away and all the knowledge is lost.

"What these collaborative framework agreements do is let you keep that knowledge from one project, enabling you to learn lessons and apply those lessons to the next."
Pooling knowledge, and providing benchmarks for the construction industry, is what Constructing Excellence has become known for since its creation in 1998.

Originally funded by government, it looked at everything from client satisfaction to predictability of cost and time. It did this by developing Key Performance Indicators (KPI) for the whole UK industry.

"Over time," says Cunningham, "KPIs have become more widely used, and are a valuable tool for the UK construction industry. We now have over 700 different types of analyses on our KPI data."

Constructing Excellence is now entirely industry-owned. This is apt - because it prides itself on innovating from what's actually happening on construction sites.

"We're one of around 20 national platforms that link up with the European Construction Technology platform," Cunningham explains. "One of the key things that we've done completely differently from any other national platform is that ours is an industry-led agenda. The whole of our consultation has been with industry and not with academia."

This approach has allowed Constructing Excellence to have an impact on one of the most critically overlooked dimensions of the construction industry: research and development (R&D).

"If you compare us to other industry sectors, the proportion of money that is invested in R&D and innovation when compared to turnover is relatively low," says Cunningham. "We are currently working with government to try and encourage further research and innovation. And they are trying to find a way by which small- to medium-sized enterprises can benefit from the major European research funding mechanisms."

Building on knowledge

Constructing Excellence, though, has come up with an innovative 'ground-up' way of boosting R&D and innovation.

Since 1999, it has run 'demonstration' projects, which connect innovative construction projects with forward-thinking supply chains. A case in point is St George's Wharf, in Vauxhall, London. The riverside development is made up of four apartment blocks - but each was deliberately built at a different time.

"We applied the learning from the first one to the second, and so on," says Cunningham. "It's had a huge impact on cost and time, enhanced quality and has had a massive impact on health and safety."

Inviting Constructing Excellence members to visit these 'demonstration' projects has proved an invaluable way of sharing the knowledge achieved on a complex job. "The demonstration projects are many, many times safer than the industry standard," Cunningham points out.

Comparing industry standards to other sectors has been one of the most useful things to come out of NESTA's Hidden Innovation report, according to Cunningham.

"The positive aspect about the report is that it's a benchmark against other sectors. It is useful to see what other people are doing - whether it's in your own sector or across UK industry as a whole.

Just as we use the Key Performance Indications within our industry to provide best practice, we can use the NESTA report to see what kind of best practice results other industries in the UK are achieving," Cunningham concludes.