Constructive Conversations

I had the pleasure this week of being a panellist on Constructive Conversations hosted by Transforming Construction Network Plus, about how industry and universities can work together, better.  The event was expertly co-chaired by Professor Jacqui Glass and Dr Diana Montgomery, and my co-panellists Andy Mitchell OBE from Tideway and Dr Jennifer Schooling CBE from the Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Cities.

Academic engagement has been a key part of my work on learning legacies and continuous learning programmes over the last 12 years and so I shared my experience of engaging with academics and how it has evolved during my time on London 2012, Crossrail, HS2 and the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal Programme, as well as my thoughts for the future. 

I’ve seen a shift in academic engagement on major projects from capturing and sharing knowledge from a project for the benefit of future projects and published in academic journals to a more collaborative approach whereby the research is benefiting the actual project whilst also ensuring high quality academic outputs.

At London 2012, academic engagement was through the learning legacy programme. The Learning Legacy was set up in response to the many requests from industry and academia to capture the learning and good practice from the programme.   We supported a number of academic research projects to capture the lessons and successes on subjects such as H&S, programme management and environment and these were published in high quality academic journals with plain English summaries for industry professionals on the Learning Legacy website (now on the Major Projects Association knowledge hub). These papers are still useful today and in fact I have seen these used recently in benchmarking on the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal programme

However all the knowledge capture on London 2012 was at the end of the project and in particular the research was intended to capture the learning for future projects and programmes.

Crossrail was a step change in that respect.    As well as academics continuing to engage on capturing learning as part of learning legacy, academics were also embedded into the programme in particular to develop its approach to innovation on the project. This industry-university collaboration enabled Crossrail to be the first major project to implement a structured methodology to innovation resulting in ￡m of benefit to the programme and setting the standard for future innovation programmes. The resulting Innovate18 platform was subsequently handed over to industry as the I3P innovation platform (for which my fellow panellist Andy Mitchell was instrumental in establishing). 

HS2 has gone even further fully embracing an industry-academia collaborative approach through relationships with UKRRIN (the UK Rail Research and Innovation Network), UKCRIC (the UK Collaboratium for Research on Infrastructure and Cities) and Cambridge Centre for Smart Infrastructure & Construction (as discussed by fellow panellist Dr Jennifer Schooling later in the event). These relationships are providing HS2 with access to world-leading research capabilities at the cutting-edge of rail innovation - aiming to help accelerate new technologies and products from research to market. 

As the Learning Legacy lead for HS2 which is being launched later this year, I am working through the research and innovation team to ensure that, as well its application in the project and publication in academic journals, all research and innovations from the programme are captured in plain English summaries on the Learning Legacy for easy dissemination to other industry professionals.  

Interestingly I am seeing a huge step change in people’s appetite to share their knowledge – in particular by the supply chain (tier 1). At London 2012 and Crossrail there was huge appetite by the client body and some involvement in the supply chain but nowhere near the level of engagement that I am seeing at HS2. 

I am also working with the Houses of Parliament Restoration and Renewal programme which is at RIBA 2 Concept design stage. They know they need to think innovatively to achieve the programme objectives - for example, It has been said that if traditional approaches to cleaning the stone are used then it would take 30 years to complete. So research and innovation is very much on the agenda. We’ve been considering what role research plays in that – direct academic collaboration, engineering doctorates, fellowship schemes (which are used in Parliament), or collaboration with organisations such as CSIC and the Construction Innovation Hub.  The programme has already had some successes working with academics such as Professor Henrik Schoenefeldt from University of Kent who has been embedded in the programme for a number of years researching the historical ventilation system in the Palace of Westminster and publishing many academic papers. However he has also used his research to develop a BIM model that is being used to inform the future ventilation design for the Palace.  Seed funding has recently been provided to Herriot Watt University, led by Professor Guy Walker in collaboration with the Health, Safety and Wellbeing team, focused on research to deliver a step change in safety, productivity and constructability through a socio-technical systems approach with the potential to save millions in reduced H&S incidents and absenteeism alone.

As I said at the start, I’ve seen a real step change in knowledge sharing culture in major projects both at a client level and in the top tiers of the supply chain. There are however still some challenges and improvements that I’d like to see in the industry - academic collaboration.

1)     We need to make research and innovations from the big projects accessible to the smaller projects. One of the barriers to innovation that the Construction 2025 report identifies is the loss of innovation at the end of the project and in fact this is some of the feedback that I received during my early discussions at HS2 – moving onto the next big thing. Learning legacy is a structured way of enabling that knowledge transfer and we need all major projects to commit to publishing research and innovations openly for use by others. I also put the call out to the I3P innovation platform to openly publish their innovations which have been hidden behind a subscription wall but actually as I was advised after the meeting, they have recently done this – which is brilliant news!

2)     Data on ROI and budget planning - we really struggled with this on the projects I’ve worked on – knowing what budget should be allocated and developing the business case for research investment would help remove the funding barrier.  It would be really helpful to have some data on the ROI of industry-academia collaborations and perhaps guidance on the % budget that should be allocated by mega/major/large/medium projects. But we also need all major projects to commit to funding research and innovation.

Both Andy Mitchell and Dr Jennifer Schooling made the point about the majority of the built environment that will exist in 2050 already exists today and so there is a need to do things differently on our existing assets. Jennifer identified the need for radical collaboration and provided an excellent example of researchers working in collaboration with industry at the Bank station upgrade project deploying sensors to enable dynamic monitoring of ground movement on masonry structures which shortened the delivery timescales and also provided a rich source of data for academic purposes.  Jennifer’s key point was that 90% of innovation projects fail but if we don’t go for it then we will definitely fail the climate crisis. We need to recognise that it can go wrong and fail fast – funders need to be flexible.

Andy Mitchell explained how Tideway are making active use of learning reports and in learning forums rather than documenting the learning at the end. They have 1700 lessons captured in a non-prescriptive format (to make it as easy as possible to share) and he thinks the key benefit of these is in sharing the people behind the reports – effectively creating a dating agency – knowing who the experts are and enabling conversations. I think this works great inside the project and could have a wider application outside of the borders of a project using tools such as Opiner, which Jonathan Norman from the Major Projects Association is currently exploring. This, alongside documenting the explicit knowledge and author details in a structured learning legacy framework effectively becomes a directory of expertise on major projects.

At Co.Cre8 we are committed to the effective sharing of knowledge across the borders of projects. Both my colleague Jo Lucas and I were involved in the development of the Major Projects Knowledge hub and are now making our commitment to the climate and biodiversity emergency through Ego to Eco. We have set up this not-for-profit company to enable organisations, industry and academia to have purposeful conversations sharing their knowledge, vision for the future and ideas on the climate and biodiversity emergency as we all make the shift from ego to eco. These will be captured on a gaming platform in the form of a ‘digital forest’ in which trees in the forest are digital representations of these interactions, in collaboration with the internationally renowned artist, Wolfgang Buttress, who draws his inspiration from our evolving relationship with the natural world.   We are using gaming technology to create communities of practice across the industry around topics that can address the climate emergency in new and innovative ways - watch this space as we develop this over the next few months.