At a time when there are a great deal of new technologies and products to help with the construction process, navigating this new landscape can be a challenge. Kaushal Diwan, and Henning Roedel share their lessons learned and approach to assessing, piloting and managing a portfolio of technologies across DPR.
DPR Innovation
Hugh Seaton: [00:00:00] Welcome to Constructed Futures. I'm Hugh Seaton. Today, I'm here with Kaushal Diwan and Henning Roedel of DPR's innovation team. Gentlemen, welcome to the podcast.
Kaushal Diwan: [00:00:12] Thank you Hugh..
Henning Roedel: [00:00:13] Thank you for having us.
Hugh Seaton: [00:00:14] You guys both have a kind of a broad view of the industry in terms of what's coming up, What's being innovated, what's being implemented.
And I wanted to ask, to start the conversation with your view of the state of innovation in construction. So talk to me a little bit about what you're seeing, even at the highest levels or really any level you want.
Kaushal Diwan: [00:00:35] So if I were to provide a sort of perspective on kind of where it's at you know, where we've been and kind of where we're going you know, I'll share that in early days and I'm thinking back to maybe five, maybe more years ago, it was very very limited.
I didn't see too many construction companies focusing on innovation, you know, in a strategic manner or a focused manner. And so it was a very uncommon to hear that a construction company had an innovation team focused on solving problems and testing new solutions.
Fast forward to today, this is something where we're seeing the reverse effect where a lot of companies have groups that are focusing on solutions and focusing on solving company problems. So a stark contrast in the way innovation is being viewed today, as you know, instead of what it was viewed few years ago and seeing a good progress and good positive movement in that arena.
Hugh Seaton: [00:01:41] And what do you think kicked that off? What do you think other than time, what do you think might've changed that?
Kaushal Diwan: [00:01:46] The biggest difference in my mind, I think is what's being, you know, what's happening externally. I think by my colleague here, Henning probably has some really good perspective on sort of that piece of it, Henning if you want to share your thoughts on that a little bit.
Henning Roedel: [00:01:59] Yeah. I mean, I think the industry itself, we've seen some transformative technologies, a lot of industries have changed because of the internet because of, cheap computing. And I think construction's no different. We have benefited greatly from those technologies and, you know, we're still going through quite a bit of digital transformation.
But you can't pass up the effect that building information modeling, virtual design and construction in general has had in our industry. And I think that was sort of a catalyst for a lot of companies to start looking inwards and saying, okay, well, if this is happening, what else can we do?
You know, couple that with Lean and, and you start to see the emergence of more of these innovation groups, right? The benefits are actually tangible and you know, there's ROI. And it just makes sense. And then once a couple of companies are doing it in the construction industry you tend to see a lot more following suit.
It is a competitive industry in that regard.
Hugh Seaton: [00:03:03] And how did DPR start your innovation? Like as a formal thing, instead of people, you know, VDC teams sort of driving some innovation, but how did you make the decision to turn it into a formal internal discipline?
Kaushal Diwan: [00:03:15] This is something Hugh that starts with one of our four core values, “ever forward” is a DPR core value. So basically all, you know, simply stated, it's challenging the status quo, right? It's, it's trying to improve on best practices and standards. And in the early days, DPR used to have a program known as the opportunity for improvement, our “OFI” program. And it was a very simple process.
It was a note card that allowed any employee to suggest an improvement to a process they felt was broken. And this was in the early nineties, when the company was still young. And what we quickly realized is that we needed to find a way to capture some of these suggestions and suggested improvements and find a way to strategically tackle them. And strategically find ways to solve problems that the company was facing at various levels: boots on the ground level, at the business level. And in 2011, this is when DPR formalized a group. We had a group that the mission was very simple: You create an environment for employees to experiment and try new things.
And it was a dedicated group and their primary focus was to create innovation pods, innovation core groups in each of our business units, and then empowering them with ideas and abilities to test new solutions to the problems. Going back to something that my colleague mentioned about external innovation, venture capitalists have really propelled the ability for us to look at solutions in a new way and create opportunities for us to pilot with solution vendors.
So in terms of where it started to where it's at now, we've taken sort of this curiosity, this empowered feeling of trying things and learning, and trying to create a framework where we can repeat that success.
Hugh Seaton: [00:05:13] The beginning of it all sounded like the Toyota production system where they're gathering insights, whether it was for quality circles or various other methods. And then you guys evolved it into something entirely new. Was the original thinking a little bit like that, as let's give the people that are doing the work, the ability to not necessarily in this case, you're not stopping the production line, cause that's not a relevant point, but giving people that are doing the work, the opportunity to comment on and improve the work, is that some of the original thinking?
Kaushal Diwan: [00:05:41] Absolutely. You know, I think fundamentally we believe that, you know, folks on the front lines are the best, the right who's in and making the decision because they're closest to the action. Right. So how do you empower them? How do you put them in a position to be able to steer when something needs to change or something needs to be adopted. And so that's fundamentally kind of where it started.
Hugh Seaton: [00:06:08] And how much was the consumerization of technology you think driving some of this wave?
Henning Roedel: [00:06:16] You know, I think that has, that kind of forced us to formalize the program a little bit you know, it's a question of how do you scale it up, right.
From 2011 to 2021 the company grew, it grew massively. And so this paper-based process it didn't scale. And so, you know, how do you... how do you leverage all of these great ideas and set up a knowledge capture system? So you're not repeating the same thing and in one part of the country and then another part of the country.
And so with consumerization of technology it made it a lot easier for people to test things on their own. And so we found it's really important and a large part of our job today is really how do we track that? How do we capture that knowledge? So that when someone else is seeing the next cool tool or software or whatever it is that we have a database and people can see like, oh yeah, we've been testing this and it's, you know, it's happening in Seattle, Why don't I reach out to my colleague and get their thoughts on it? And see what they say. And that's, that's sort of the organic nature that we're trying to or organic conversations that we're trying to build through, you know, dissemination of knowledge.
Hugh Seaton: [00:07:29] Let's talk about that a little bit, because I think knowledge management, it's not a construction specific problem, right? Every company that has thinking people in it, they generate knowledge and, you want to not reinvent things as much as you can avoid it. What do you guys do to avoid two different sites or two different teams testing something for the first time. Is there a way that you kind of publish it or, you know, just kind of again, keep the conversation going. So people know what other folks in the, in the country are doing.
Kaushal Diwan: [00:08:01] I'll share my thoughts on it, but I think, you know, this is a project that my colleague Henning's been working on. So I'd like to give him a little more time to kind of explain what's going on there, but basically simply put Hugh the biggest challenge is to be able to communicate this information effectively.
So people know that it's there, that they could leverage this dedicated team, right. To help them solve a problem. And also, how do you make that available in a way that it's almost like a self-service model where people, they have a question, they know they can go to this one place. They can search, and if it's not there, then potentially that solution does not exist. Right. And so my colleague, Henning's been spending a lot of time trying to focus on that and evaluate that. So, you know, Henning, what are your thoughts on this one?
Henning Roedel: [00:08:50] Yeah, this is, this is something that you know, I noticed kind of early on when I joined the team in 2019 you know, we had certain pilots happening across the company.
And I wanted to, just learn more about them. And it was as easy as picking up the phone and calling the right people. But I was starting to wonder to myself, like, you know, is there anything slipping through the cracks? We're a large organization. And so we started, we had this sort of backend system for funding requests a large, again, another large part of our job is just removing barriers.
So that when people have an idea or have a passion to change something they're not bogged down by bureaucracy and funding. So we had that back end process. And I thought we could improve upon it and turn it more into a, Hey, what's happening around the company. Make it easy to search because you know, vendors being vendors, they have their sales and marketing teams and that they're not gonna email just one person.
They're going to cast a wide net and that's the nature of the industry. And so we wanted to just capture that a little bit more and make it easier for the vendors themselves to contact us. We're sort of a major gatekeeper for anything new. So we wanted to streamline that and make it easier.
And as a Kaushal said you know, a lot of people are intrigued, maybe it's for a, an RFP or it's a project engineer that's, has a lot of energy and is passionate about changing the industry. And you know, they don't have to start at square one. They can, they can learn from their other colleagues that are in the same boat.
Hugh Seaton: [00:10:30] That's amazing. And you know, that sort of knowledge base can grow to the point where it's almost unwieldy. Do you do I mean, how do you get people engaging with that? Right? Cause they have day jobs that are often kind of long days. Do you guys do a digest? Do you do events? Do you do hackathons? I mean, I've heard all sorts of different ideas in the past.
Henning Roedel: [00:10:49] We are starting to formalize that a little bit. We have demo days now. And so vendors that enter into our system we look through them and see if there's a good fit and we invite them to present to our most innovative employees.
And that gives us a lot of feedback on what the company needs and is looking for. And it's yeah it's a good overall session
Kaushal Diwan: [00:11:13] I was going to add to that. Hugh, we also realize the power of decentralizing some of the stuff that the team focuses on and we wanted to encourage others to participate. Right.
What's pretty clear to us is there are a lot of entrepreneurial thinkers in the company. And how do you involve them more? How do you leverage their expertise and passions? And so we also looked at a different model where we created these small think tanks, these small core groups in each of our business units.
So what ended up happening was we basically created small, you know, mini innovation teams in each of our business units that the corporate team interacts with. So it turns into a two-way street of not only having a closer connection to our projects and our business units, but also creating a network that we can get feedback from, when it came down to specific solutions.
Hugh Seaton: [00:12:10] Yeah. I mean, the reason I ask and I, I really liked where you guys went with this is you find in any ecosystem, whether it's a company or larger, velocity is often the best way to get things out there. There isn't a single silver bullet, as they say, it's just, you have a lot of conversations and you know, you organize some of them and you make some of them be a little bit more ad hoc, but it's just the velocity that gets the conversation going and keeps it top of mind.
I want to ask if you guys, you know, how you think about innovation as a thing you do versus a competence you're building, obviously both are true, but how do you think of it as a competence of the company, as opposed to just activities that are organized?
Kaushal Diwan: [00:12:49] There is an intrinsic piece of this. You know, one of the big things culturally, that, that we try to, you know get folks to realize is that innovation is not something that you set time aside for.
It's not something you can say, I'll do it, you know, one day a week or one hour a week. It's something that just happens naturally. Right? It's a muscle that you have to build. And once you have something, how do you take it, you know, how do you take it to the next level? You know? And we realized that it's, sometimes people need help breaking down a problem. Sometimes they need help in saying, okay, I've got this problem and how do I go about solving it? So how do you apply design thinking skills to just go about creating, you know, some sort of a framework or a metric that says once I'm done with this pilot, that, you know, I learned something from it.
Henning, I think you had some other good thoughts on this one, too.
Henning Roedel: [00:13:43] Absolutely. I mean, and this is, you know, another fun aspect of our job. It's the coaching of these innovation teams that each of our business units, right? These are folks who are volunteering their time. They've obviously demonstrated a passion for changing their work or the industry and everything in between.
And, you know, it's fun. We take them through the process and that's sort of the coaching that we do. So we have set up this sort of, identify a problem or challenge or an opportunity; identify potential solutions, and then let's test them. Let's actually flex that and see if it works.
And, you know, that's just a cycle that repeats. And of course, you know, sometimes you get success right out of the gate. Oftentimes you know, it doesn't work out the way you imagined and that's fine. And so that's, you know, that's the part that we have to continue to reinforce. And so for the employees and colleagues who are interested in doing that they get that opportunity.
We offer it free of charge. And it's really fun. You know, especially after you can look back on a year and just see all the work that you've done and all the things that you've been able to accomplish. It's, it's really quite rewarding.
Hugh Seaton: [00:14:53] I love that. That's really cool. And one of the, I'm assuming both intentional and, lucky outcomes of that is you make it a better place to work.
So as you guys think about the workforce challenges that I, right now everybody's facing one of them, but is that part of how you think about this also is you're making DPR a better place to work, to attract the talent that you know, you need and you know, is, you know, There's, there's going to be a bit of a labor shortage for the foreseeable future.
I mean, is that part of how you guys think of this is, is, you know, quality of work and quality of life.
Kaushal Diwan: [00:15:26] Absolutely. I think, you know, Henning you probably, since you're new to the company, you could probably, you know, give us your experience. And how you feel about this. How has it made you feel about working at DPR?
Henning Roedel: [00:15:40] Yeah, absolutely. I, when I was looking for a new job I had two offers and it was essentially the same role and I ultimately ended up going with DPR. And the main reason being, and I think, I think it was Kaushal who was saying, this is, you know, we have the culture. Right. You know, do you want to be joining a company and working against the sort of top management or, you know, do you have to constantly prove and validate your ideas' worth?
Or do you want to work at a place where, you know, we find the intrinsic value of your idea. We understand it. And it's more of a question of how do we make it happen. Instead of why, why, why? And that's what sold it for me. And, you know, I hope other people who hear this podcast hear that story because I think it is a major aspect ofworking at DPR.
You are given a lot of responsibility early on and you know, that comes with a lot of freedom and you get todo what you want to do here. And I do believe that attracts the best and the brightest. And yeah, I just really enjoy it.
Hugh Seaton: [00:16:49] And I think what makes that, what the reason I brought it up is it isn't just that you're given freedom to think and make a mistake here and there, but there's an organization that will take an idea and do something with it because it's so common in big companies that, you know, your boss says, cool idea.
And then what do you do? You know, like you had a good meeting and that's it, but the fact that you, that's why I asked also about knowledge management and how you kind of take this massive ideas that accumulates over time and start to do things with it and having an organized way to take a good idea and, and, you know, assess it.
It doesn't mean it's going to be become company policy, but at least it gets a fair shake because there's a, there's a process in place for it.
Henning Roedel: [00:17:30] Absolutely.
Hugh Seaton: [00:17:31] That was, that was kind of an open-ended one. So I want to talk a little bit about how you guys look at you know, there's kind of three pieces to this question is identifying, needs that that technology might or might not address and then how you go approach outside innovations and then, or if you sometimes develop solutions internally. So just start starting with the kind of problem identification. How does that typically work?
Kaushal Diwan: [00:17:56] Problem identification, I mean, it sort of this is a tough one, you know, you can say, well, let's just build a database and then throw all our problems in there. And then it'll be easy to identify, you know, what the top problem is, right? And that's honestly, that's something we're trying to do right now, but I can tell you if it comes in many forms, you know.
Sometimes it comes by just way of luck. You're visiting a job site, you've talked to a superintendent and then you realize that he's explaining something to you that's a, either a symptom of a problem or a problem itself. And then you do many other similar interactions by visiting other jobs and you find out, Hey, A lot of people that are facing the same challenge, right?
Sometimes problem identification comes by way of data. You know, you start seeing patterns when you see something, the same thing occurring on multiple job sites and sometimes it's, you know, it's something you just kind of, not obvious, but you stumbled upon. But I don't know, Henning, I think this is another one of those things where you you've kind of spent some time exploring and evaluating love to hear your thoughts.
Henning Roedel: [00:19:00] Yeah. I like to think of it as, as problems and opportunities are two sides of the same coin. And, you know, as, as Kaushal said, we are trying to build a database here and short answer. I think we have too many problems that we can solve with our current resources. And that's true with any large organization.
And that's fine. And so it's a question of, okay, where do you spend your effort? And you know, we're a small team in also a very large organization and there's a lot of other folks in corporate service that I have problems that they're working on. And so it is a question of, okay, what are we capable of solving and what are we where can we really add value instead of being another cook in the kitchen? So you're balancing that out.
But as Kaushal said that it comes in many forms and when we go out and we interview teams and we ask them challenges that they're facing we visit job sites and just have these sort of one-on-one conversations. And you know, cross-reference that with, similar people in different roles or amongst each other.
And that's, you know, that's enough to to keep us busy for the time being.
Hugh Seaton: [00:20:06] And how often do you find you know, a company will come to you and they have a solution to a problem you were probably aware of, but they really open up the opportunity to do something differently or something really new.
Is that a big part of your process as well?
Henning Roedel: [00:20:20] It's not. It happens, it does happen. And you know, I would say our team is a bit more opportunistic, right? We're we're happy to have that conversation with a vendor. I think the assumption here is that the vendors themselves are doing their homework as well.
Right. You're not getting funding based on a whim you're getting market data, you're doing those interviews. And so the intrinsic understanding is that yeah, they they've probably done their homework and we canprobably identify it within our company as well.
But to say that, you know, Hey, this, this vendor emailed me the day after. I just had a conversation with somebody. You know, that that does happen, but it's, it's not the norm.
Hugh Seaton: [00:21:00] Well, what I'm getting from your answer though also is, is something that I hear, but it's nice to hear, you know, Really hear it cause sometimes it's, it's implied is... outside of an organization, it can seem like you see something that they don't see inside an organization. And I think people that create products and technologies for construction often miss the power of being in the middle of it. And you know what I mean? Like you, you work at the company, so you see, you see a level of nuance that is really hard to even approximate outside.
So things that are a little obvious to you, or certainly are not revelatory, I think people probably show up at your doorstep thinking that they're about to rock your world. And you're like, Hey man, this is great. Thank you. But we kind of know,
do you see that a little bit?
Henning Roedel: [00:21:41] That happens too.
Kaushal Diwan: [00:21:42] I'll add something there, Hugh, you just kind of touched on something that's really important too. Is sometimes vendors don't know the problems that we have. Right. And they make an assumption and there are situations where, we test a solution and then create a problem that's new and it didn't exist before, but now that we've tested the solution, we've created a new problem.
And so you kind of get both sides of the coin. I think the times where we have you know, a greater degree of success is when we work with the vendor early on, they spend time exploring and understanding what the problem is, and then they tailor their solution in a way that actually helps us solve it.
And, but that those kinds of efforts, they don't happen as frequent as much as we want to. And, but the times that they do happen, it's a longer engagement. It's all a partnership, you know, it's not just pay for our software and off you go.
Hugh Seaton: [00:22:38] I wonder if construction is one is one of those industries where that's a little rare.
Where it's just going to work on its own. I mean, are there going to be examples like, you know, box or Dropbox where, okay, it is what it is. But you just hear over and over again, that services is a piece of going to market in construction because of the complexity of the jobs and, and how there's a, you know, a level of uniqueness. If you see that in other industries, medical devices are the same thing. You, you don't, you don't sell a thing without some service.
Kaushal Diwan: [00:23:05] I going to just make a point there. One thing that I'm seeing and observing there's a, there's a debate. Whether is it make more sense to invest time and deploy a platform?
Which does, you know, start to finish all the processes, you know on a construction project life cycle, or do you invest your time in point solutions that do you know, one-off processes really well that a platform does not do really well? You know what I mean? So that's a, that's a big debate right now.
Hugh of where do companies spend their time? You know, is it a mixture of both? Is it one or is it the other that's a huge debate right now.
Hugh Seaton: [00:23:45] Well, that actually leads to the question I was going to ask actually. And that is, you know, outside of construction, the amount of money that's spent on core, IT is often higher than it is in construction.
And it's one of those, those statistics that gets thrown around a lot. And there's some merit to it, I'm assuming. And some of that is that historically. It just hasn't IT hasn't been, obviously you have, you know, the basics, but hasn't been as important as it might be in some other industries.
And one of the things that IT often does is what a platform does, right? Is they create an enterprise bus or some version of that that will consume different services and make them available to everybody who's on the system. As you guys think about innovation again, more broadly. And as an ongoing, you know, multi-year process, is IT growing, do you think, and happy to speak at DPR level or even more broadly than that, but do you see that IT is beginning to spend more or be given more responsibility for some of the things you might've expected a platform to do externally?
Kaushal Diwan: [00:24:45] I mean, if I were to speak to that real quickly, I would say You know, as a company what I'm starting to see a little more of is. I mean, every company is a technology company to some degree. Right. And as a lot of these solutions come online, as you see there's also threats in terms of cybersecurity, you know, challenges and whatnot.
Yeah. I do see, you know, this area growing specifically for construction, it's ripe for innovation. It's ripe for, you know improvement. And so, in my mind I see that I see that growing in the years to come and you know, it could even get to a point Hugh where technology could even change the core revenue of a construction company, you know, where construction was, the bread and butter.
Right. But that's, yeah. You know, you're now like going into the BHAG world where it could be a goal.
Hugh Seaton: [00:25:33] Well, when you look at Amazon as an example, I'm not sure that if you asked them 15 years ago, if web services or cloud services would be, you know, one of their main drivers of profit, that they would know that they may have been a Glint in someone's eyes, but you know, over time, their internal competence became such that they could rent it outside.
I don't think it's crazy to think that something like that might happen with a company, the size of DPR, where you find some of your internal processes are, you know, worth renting out whether it's to an owner or someone else. Who knows?
So I want to end with kind of an open-ended question about kind of projects or directions or, or kind of initiatives that you're particularly proud of.
Henning Roedel: [00:26:15] You know, right now we've been putting a lot of effort into robotics and by we, I mean, Kaushal and I, we've been working a lot of different companies and you know,I'm going to be moving more and more into robotics, I think as just a, you know, following my passion, which is, which is really fun and exciting.
And also because the outside investment has made robotics come down to a price point that works for construction as well as, you know, just technology in general has enabled, you know, field robotics And I'm very excited about that. And we've, we've had some really exciting pilots in my, just my two years of working here.
And I just, I see this as a growing movement. So I'm very excited about that. I'm very proud of the work we've done so far. Enabling sort of new business cases. We've already generated some value for the company. And I think we can do a lot more.
So that's, that's always good, the innovation you're always wondering am I, am I really doing the right thing for the company? Are we, are we just kind of chasing a shiny object. And I can say with this program so far that we've really impressed the right people and done some fun stuff. So I'm excited to keep working on that and I'm proud of what we've done so far.
Hugh Seaton: [00:27:32] That's super exciting.
Kaushal Diwan: [00:27:34] Yeah, you know, there there's a project that I am really proud of and actually led to development of two other things for us as a company. We, few years ago, you know, about the time when Henning started with our team, we launched a company-wide idea competition.
And the goal was, how do you engage, you know, with the company, how do you involve folks in suggesting, you know solutions that they think could help the company in a big way? And we really just kind of opened it up, right? We said, no idea was too crazy. You know, give us your wildest ideas, but then tie it in some ways to a company strategy or something that, you know, that aligns with the direction we're trying to go.
And, you know, that idea competition generated 172 proposals within a span of two weeks. And it really kicked off, this you know, it really validated to us that, Hey, if we engage the company in the right way and, you know, give them a challenge, we can really get some outstanding results, and that competition increased our employee engagement from 35% to 92%.
You know, for six months. So that proved to me that the hunger, the passion, the employee engagement is there. And what that competition also kicked off for us is when we identified the winner, it created ability for us to explore developing products, internally developed products. So that kicked off an effort to now, we're exploring, product development internally both not only for the internal customer, maybe even solutions that we can spin out as commercial products.
And then the second thing that was related to that competition, we had a field foreman who, you know, a very entrepreneurial thinker and he spotted a problem in the field where he was trying to do vertical building control and there wasn't a, a product available for him to do that effectively.
So what did he do? He designed his own. He took SketchUp. He took, you know, a 3d printer that was laying around and he designed his own product. And he started printing these concretes sleeves that were voids for that he could use you know, as he was doing building control. Let's fast forward to now we have pursued a patent with the USPTO.
We're waiting to hear back if the patent is approved, but we also commercialize that product we've are in the process of mass producing those and deploying them to all of our DPR projects. So those are two examples of how an idea went from a concept to something somebody was passionate about.
And, you know, going through the necessary steps of design thinking and evaluating has led to bigger results for the company.
Hugh Seaton: [00:30:25] I love that example. And the fact that that innovation was a tool for culture. I don't know about culture change so much as culture, kind of excitement and innovation, is a really cool one.
Gentlemen, thank you for the time on the podcast, I've learned a lot and really enjoy talking to you.
Kaushal Diwan: [00:30:41] Thank you Hugh.
Henning Roedel: [00:30:42] Thank you for your time here.