Construction does not have an innovation problem. We innovate every day. Put a good team of engineers in front of a difficult project and they will find solutions. They will challenge assumptions, develop new methodologies, build tools and work out better ways of doing things.
Our problem is what happens afterwards. The project finishes, the team moves on and too much of what was learned moves with them. The drawings and models are saved. The real intellectual value – why something worked, what failed, what was developed along the way and how it could be done better next time – is much harder to capture.
Then, somewhere else in the business, another team encounters a similar problem and starts solving it again. That is an incredibly inefficient way for an industry built around expertise to operate. Knowledge Management (KM) is not enough. The conventional answer is better KM.
Lessons learned, project close-outs, technical presentations and knowledge repositories are all useful. We use them at AESG and they absolutely have a place. But we should not confuse recording knowledge with developing capability.
A lessons-learned process asks: what did we learn? R&D asks: what can we now do with it? If 5-engineers develop a better way of engineering better building performance on a complex project, putting the methodology into a shared folder is not institutionalising innovation. Can it be replicated? Can it work across different building types? Can we automate parts of it? Can we turn it into a tool? Can 500 people use something that started with 5? That is the difference.
The objective should not simply be to stop organisations forgetting what they know. It should be to make the organisation permanently more capable because of what it has learned. Ideas are the easy part. Institutionalising great ideas is the real innovation. There is also a tendency to romanticise innovation.We picture innovation starting with someone having a brilliant new idea. In engineering, it is usually much more practical than that. Innovation often starts because something does not work. A project presents a problem. The standard methodology is inadequate. The client wants something that has not been done before. The programme is too tight. The available data is insufficient. The economics do not stack up. Engineers then find a solution.
Construction therefore produces an enormous amount of innovation simply because it produces an enormous number of difficult problems. The challenge is identifying which solutions have value beyond the project that created them. That requires something project delivery alone cannot provide: dedicated time, resources, budget and the ability to experiment without knowing whether the answer will work. On a live project, uncertainty is something we quite rightly try to eliminate. In R&D, uncertainty is the whole point. If we already know the answer, it isn’t R&D.
This is why I think the UAE’s new R&D Tax Incentives Programme is particularly relevant to construction and engineering. The financial incentive is clearly attractive. But I think the more interesting aspect is the framework it creates around what genuine R&D actually looks like. Qualifying R&D must be novel, creative, uncertain, systematic and transferable or reproducible. For our industry, the last 2-words are particularly important. Construction is already novel and creative. Complex projects force it to be. Where we have historically been weaker is making innovation systematic and transferable.
Systematic means taking an idea out of the pressure of a live project and properly testing it. Transferable means that if it works, the benefit does not stay with the 5-people who developed it. At AESG, this is something we have been increasingly deliberating about. We have invested in a dedicated Data Hall at our Dubai headquarters that allows our teams to develop and test AI-enabled workflows, engineered solutions, digital twins, and real-time simulation. The hardware itself is not particularly interesting. What interests me is whether something developed to solve one client’s problem can become a better way of delivering engineering across the business.
That is where R&D starts creating real value. Engineering knowledge needs to scale. There is a commercial argument here as well. Engineering consultancy has traditionally monetised knowledge through people. An engineer spends 10-or-20 years developing expertise. That experience makes them better at solving problems and more valuable to clients. It is a model that works, but it inherently does not move the entire industry forward. R&D gives us another route. An engineer’s insight can become a methodology. A methodology can become a tool. A tool can be deployed across hundreds of projects. And, in some cases, that tool or methodology can become intellectual property with commercial value of its own.
That does not make engineers less important. Quite the opposite. It allows the intellectual value created by our best people to reach far beyond the projects they can personally work on. I think this is one of the biggest opportunities facing engineering consultancies over the next decade. AI will accelerate it but AI is not the strategy. Simply giving everyone access to new technology does not suddenly make an organisation innovative. The businesses that will benefit most will be those that build a system around innovation: identifying ideas emerging from projects, investing in the best ones, testing them properly and then deploying what works across the organisation.
The UAE’s R&D incentives provide another reason to do that, and I hope our industry takes advantage of them because there is something fundamentally wrong with an engineering business solving the same difficult problem twice. Every project should leave behind more than a building. It should leave behind a better engineering business.
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