Building a better future

The construction industry is not known as being particularly innovative; not often mentioned in the same breath as the life sciences or digital sectors. It’s a slightly unfair characterisation. It’s good at problem solving; building in challenging conditions, for example, and for new materials or building processes. But, across the industry, innovation is not the first word that comes to mind.

That’s about to change. Next month, Deputy First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will launch the Construction Scotland Innovation Centre (CSIC) at the inaugural Construction Scotland Conference (7 October). CSIC is one of eight new innovation centres established to deliver transformational change across various key industry sectors in Scotland.

CSIC is supported by the Scottish Funding Council, Scottish Enterprise, Highlands and Islands Enterprise and 11 Scottish university partners. It will bring together industry, academic and public sector partnerships to deliver transformational change in the construction industry. For the past six months, Bill McBride, managing director of specialist industry supplier Westcrowns CS Ltd, has been serving as interim chairman of CISC, putting the pieces in place for its launch.

“There has been work done in the past to move the industry forward in certain ways, but with mixed success. The intentions have been good but it’s not always been possible to have an impact across the sector,” he said. “I think this new initiative has the potential to be an enormous catalyst for change.”

Construction is a significant part of Scotland’s economy, providing jobs for 170,000 people – 10 per cent of the working population – and contributing around £8.9bn. But, as McBride noted, those jobs are spread across 31,000 businesses. People associate building with a small number of big names which, while they are important, in fact equate to less than a third of the value created by the sector and only directly employ 6,000 people.

McBride believes the founding by the Scottish Government and Scottish Enterprise of Construction Scotland, an industry-led body speaking for the whole of the sector, represented a significant first step in driving change. The CISC is one manifestation of that. “An important part of the proposal that really captured my imagination is the link with universities and higher education,” said McBride.

“We now have 11 universities signed up and our plan is to instigate a new way of thinking about how to make construction better. Previously we have approached improvement within the existing paradigm. What we want to take advantage of is that we have an extremely strong higher education sector and if we can match industry aims and ambitions with new thinking coming out of universities and so on, we will have a much better chance of producing a tangible result.”

The specific objectives of CSIC are to:

Uncover and develop with industry the value that lies in innovating
Drive future demand for the innovation support available from Scotland’s leading universities
Empower industry to take ownership of the innovation process
Align academic expertise and public sector agency support
Bridge existing gaps by matching industry need to appropriate innovation support packages
Deliver support from inception to commercialisation

To bring about the required transformational change within the construction industry, CSIC will deliver a streamlined, single-point-of-entry to a wealth of existing and new academic/public sector expertise, alongside the provision of appropriate innovation support where gaps exist and industry demand is not currently being met.

McBride cited the development of innovative products, whole systems thinking, collaborative research practices, open standard solutions, new opportunities for training and task-sharing approaches to marketing and commercialisation. “All with an unambiguous focus on innovation as a catalyst to culture change and greater economic impact for the businesses involved and for Scotland as a whole,” he said.

Across a pan-Scotland network of people and facilities, CSIC will deliver a range of industry-led projects and initiatives focused on four key industry identified support channels:
Business Innovation Support: Assisting businesses to collaborate with academia, public sector and other industry partners. Helping businesses seek out support and training to allow them to evolve an innovative culture. Helping businesses adopt or create innovative business models that will capture or create new opportunities.

Product Innovation Support: Helping businesses develop new construction products, components and solutions that deliver innovation to the supply chain. Support could be with entire supply chain partners or individual companies and aimed at delivering prototyping or testing/certification.

Process Innovation Support: Assisting businesses develop new manufacturing or assembly systems. Clients will typically be businesses that are keen to adapt traditional processes.
Service Innovation Support: Helping businesses to access new market opportunities both locally and internationally. Assisting businesses seeking to develop innovative marketing models, new ways of engaging with customers, or monitoring impact. 

McBride wants people to be at the focus of driving innovation. “Yes, processes and products are important and we will have a specific focus on these and on bringing all of these things together. But it’s people who create the culture of innovation. Our vision is that where today HR is seen as a key role in a company, in the years to come there will also be a manager responsible for keeping the company innovative.”

As part of this, CISC will work with universities to develop MSc and PhD courses and encourage innovation work placements with construction companies. McBride views the funding of CISC, around £9m, as an investment in the future, much as a business would. “And we want to demonstrate a return on the investment, by helping companies become more successful and employ more people,” he said.

He has also overseen the establishment of a broad-based board of governance for CISC, with experts from academia, government procurement, people improvement as well as small and large construction companies (the board also has two observer members, from Scottish Enterprise and the Scottish Funding Council). Last month, Stephen Good, an architect by profession and former director of iQ Building Futures Lab, a CCG company, was appointed chief executive.

For McBride, the aim has been to put solid foundations in place – and to be fair, he resisted using the term until near the end of our conversation – rather than chasing headlines; he wants this to be an enduring initiative that puts innovation at the heart of Scotland’s construction industry. And it’s a subject close to his heart. At Westcrowns, he has led a team which has taken a long-established family business into international markets, now employing 400 people with a turnover of £40m. But, despite the innovation it has brought in areas including illuminated glass, the team was stopped in its tracks not long ago when an architect designed a house based on the ambitions of the Kyoto climate change agreement. It had virtually no glass.

“In business, if you want to stay ahead, to be innovative, you can’t just look six months or a year ahead. You have to look five, 10, 20 years ahead,” said McBride. Today, Westcrowns is working with an American company on a glass product which has the thermal properties of concrete, just one example of insulating your business against future shocks to the economy.
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