Challenge Teams: An Innovative Path to the Future

RT-TC-04 designed and iterated a brainstorming workshop to motivate participation without offering compensation. Through this process, the team identified principles for thoughtful innovation that answer the following questions (FR-TC-04):

• Why does a company need to adopt new technology? (Section 2.1, Growth, on p. 3)
• How do we find the innovators in a company? (Section 2.2.2, Thoughtful Innovation, on p. 6)
• How can we instill a feeling of urgency in our change initiatives? (Section 2.2.2 subsection, Compelling Drivers of Change, also on p. 6; Section 3, Divergent Thinking: Mars Industries, on p. 10)
• What does it mean to think from first principles and why is it important? (Section 2.2.2 subsection, A New Perspective, on p. 7)

RT-TC-04 discovered that the quality of ideas shared during brainstorming workshops improved with imposition of a stringent framework (FR-TC-04, Section 3.1.2, Iteration Two, on p. 14). To help the challenge teams pursue their innovation activities, the team provided a “Viable Paths Framework” (Section 4.5, The Viable Paths Framework, on p. 24).

The team parsed the more than 1,500 individual innovation ideas it collected from the brainstorming workshops, distilling them into 12 fundamental productivity and efficiency enablers (FR-TC-04, Section 4.3, Technology Enablers, on p. 22):

1. Transparency and Trust
2. Fast and Reliable Payments
3. Equipment and Facility Modularization
4. Component Standardization
5. Information Systems Interoperability
6. User Interfaces
7. Forecasting and Simulation Fidelity
8. Detailed Engineering and Planning
9. Sensors and State Awareness
10. Automation
11. Workforce and Community Wellness
12. Environmental Sustainability

RT-TC-04 performed a trial run of the CII Challenge Teams Program in its entirety by using five challenge teams. Each challenge team focused on a unique challenge in the capital projects industry, developed its own vision for the future, and contributed to a total of 78 slides of brainstormed material. RT-TC-04 combined many of these ideas into a vision board that depicts a truly bold and exciting picture of what our industry could look like in 30 years (FR-TC-04, Section 5.2, Challenges Teams Vision Board; Figure 11).