An opinion piece by Dave Philip, Impact Director, The Hub

Engaging with tomorrow – A Hub workshop

As part of its legacy work, The Hub ) held an engagement workshop in Edinburgh earlier this month to determine strategic regional priorities. Participants joined from a variety of organisations, including government departmental representatives, innovation centres, academia and wider construction industry.

The workshop was facilitated by Hub staff using a three-horizons framework model to scan priority themes and innovation needs.  Following a series of scene-setting presentations, participants working in teams established across the x-axis the of the framework canvas what the three time eras for the science of change were seen as within the context of the Scottish construction market. Interestingly, as opposed to working across a traditional left-to-right arrow of time, participants started with the end in mind  and examined the finish point for the last horizon, which was agreed as 2030, dictating an eight-year window across the three eras of change.  The rationale for this timeframe was that many organisations are being challenged to deliver significant impact by the end of the decade such as net-zero and ten years would fall beyond policy and societal needs.

Secondly, participants discussed the first era which was seen as a, now-to two-year horizon. The logic for this was that it is historically difficult in Scotland to make any significant and aligned changes within any shorter time frame.  This, therefore, left a three-to-five-year middle horizon.

Having determined the three x-axis time horizons, the ambitions of these eras were discussed and established as:

Using this framework, each horizon was discussed in detail, starting with horizon 1 which was seen as both leveraging quick-win projects and preparing for future mid- to long-term outcomes through enabling activities such as developing policies to enable innovation priorities.

Key to this era was seen as having a harmonised vision of the Built Environment – aligned to thematic drivers and priorities. It was noted that the Hub “Our vision for the built environment” https://indd.adobe.com/view/f2092c85-cd16-4186-9035-e2a63adc2bf9 could form the starting point for this work.

Additionally, it was deemed important that innovation guidance should be developed to support both the pull (client bodies etc) and push (supply chain etc) defining what needs doing to achieve innovative outcomes.   Procurement guidance that encourages innovation from the supply chain, managing innovation risk and defines end-state outcomes and metrics was also seen as important.

Trial projects or pathfinders were seen as important to evidence new methods; however, it was also stated that these should be agile and not inhibit uptake. Making best use of innovation centres and sandboxing were seen as important in this context.

The transparency and dashboard of the Scottish Infrastructure Pipeline forecast tool was seen as important, but participants believed that this should be further leveraged to align with innovation themes and build innovation in-to business cases and procurement.

The second era was seen to be a shift from “doing it right” to “doing it better” and realising marginal games from the outputs realized in horizon one.

Within this era the sentiment was, we need to both incentivise innovation and build industry capability and capacity around innovative practices and more focus on design thinking approaches.

The need to stabilise R&D funding (no start and stop) and link to strategic outcomes and KPIs was also perceived as important.

Ensuring that any successful proofs of concepts in horizon 1 could be rapidly upscaled was also seen as vital.

Lastly, horizon 3 was examined which was seen as shifting into a transformational era where the focus was on by now doing a better thing.  The primary area of focus was stated as creating resilience within the forecast investment pipeline and realisation of impact from the outputs and outcomes of the earlier horizons.

Some of the key impact areas discussed were:

• Net Zero
• Improved societal vale of infrastructure
• Optimised productivity

The consensus of workshop participants was we need to accelerate innovation and at the same time redefine and embed value in all we do in the built environment if we are to improve future impact.  It was observed that we managed to make this transformation during a health crisis, and we now need to do similar during a climate crisis.