October - 2019CONSTRUCTIONTECHREVIEW.COM8IN MYOPINIONINNOVATION OPPORTUNITIES IN CONSTRUCTIONBy Jake Pepper, Vice President of Integrated Construction Services (ICS), Pepper Construction GroupThe opportunity for innovation in construction is greater today than ever before. In December of 2015, McKinsey Global Institute issued a report titled "Digital America: A Tale of the Haves and Have-Mores." It included the MGI Industry Digiti-zation Index that ranked construction second to last out of 21 different industries, just above hunting and agricul-ture, with regard to the digitization of assets, usage, and labor. It also indicated that our productivity growth between 2005 and 2014 was at -1.4%. Because of this report, innovation in our industry is being driven by technology, and particularly from tech start-ups. It's exciting to see tech companies interested in our industry and developing applications using technologies like augmented reality and Artificial Intelligence. One of the biggest challenges with innovation is figuring out how to move it from theory or prototype to operations. When we built our Net Zero trailer, many peer companies told us they had the same idea. It wasn't the idea itself that was innovative but the fact that we did it ­ and in a way that it can be replicated. Another challenge with innovation is discerning which ideas are better left for others to develop fully. Constructing the Net Zero trailer taught us that, for several reasons, it's smarter to partner with a third-party than to manufacture them ourselves.At Pepper, our goal is to embrace the changes that are headed toward the AEC industry and to apply them in a way that makes sense for us. Just three years ago, Pepper created our Integrated Construction Services (ICS) department to deliver a better project for our clients. Just a year and a half ago, we focused our ICS department on including our Preconstruction group, our Technical Services group and our High-Performance &Sustainability group, which are integrated through their creation and use of 3D models. We established a rotational program through these departments for employees interested in building additional skill sets. After one team member finished her technical services rotation, she moved into our preconstruction group, where she had an idea: She suggested that she could model a building faster than she could do take-
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