The buildings and infrastructure industries are in the midst of massive change. Innovations in technology, strategy and thinking are transforming the way people envision and enact the built environment. BuiltWorlds is lucky enough to have a network that spans both the globe and construction's value change, which provides a unique opportunity for us to collect a variety of informed perspectives on a diverse array of topics.
In 2024, we had the chance to pick the brains of a number of innovation leaders and decision makers from some of the most forward thinking and influential companies in the business. For your convenience, we've collected those interviews in one, easily accessible location. See below for more details.
The Importance of Financing FinTech: A Q&A With Blackhorn Venture’s Ray Levitt
"I often find that founders of companies are so concerned about dilution that they underestimate their capital needs, raise too little money early on, and end up having to scramble to raise money before they have adequately de-risked their technology or the market acceptance of it, leading to subsequent flat or down rounds that dilute them more than they would have been diluted had they raised more money initially."
Embodied Carbon, Mass Timber and Upstream Impacts: Q&A With ZGF Architects’ Marty Brennan
"The most immediate opportunity for decarbonization and improved public health is understanding and addressing upstream impacts in construction material supply chains, from forests to concrete suppliers to steel mills. This starts with conversations with suppliers around carbon accounting, labor practices and decarbonization plans."
Mass Timber, Offsite Construction, and Other Sustainable Building Practices: A Q&A With Swinerton’s Lisa Podesto
"The extremes in material pricing experienced after COVID were felt across the entire material and labor spectrum and were unprecedented. While all commodities experience some degree of normal price fluctuation in response to supply and demand changes, mass timber benefits from a unique mechanism for mitigating this volatility."
Defining and Driving Innovation: A Q&A With STOBG’s Rob Leon
"By fostering an innovative and technology-driven culture, we can inherently attract the new talent needed to remain a leader in our industry. It also puts us in a command position to collaborate with high schools and higher education partners in influencing curriculum, establishing intern programs, and ultimately recruiting the best talent available."
Pragmatic Innovation and Self-Regulating AI: A Q&A With Bluebeam CEO Usman Shuja
"In terms of the fieldworker, as I continue to have conversations with customers and observe the idiosyncrasies of the millions of diverse people that comprise the construction industry workforce, I worry that there’s a growing disconnect between how these technologies are being built and marketed, and how workers in the field—those pouring concrete and setting steel beams—communicate, operate and think."
Working With AI: A Q&A With Gerdau's Luis Lourenzi
"I think one of the first steps that people have to have in mind when working with AI, or data overall, is just ensuring that you have a very consistent data quality process that is being established. That process to embrace the culture of digital transformation and the use of AI begins with making sure you have quality data, and that you're actually able to access that data first before trying to do an AI use case."
Building an Offsite-Ready Organization: A Q&A With The Boldt Group's New Leaders in Modular
"The ability to eliminate waste and deploy improvements is exponentially higher in a factory setting than a jobsite. One of the elements people don’t realize at first is the benefit to an owner’s program of standardization. This process tends to strip out ‘nice to have’ and replaces it with ‘this works perfectly and is not overdesigned.’"
Top-Down Impact: A Q&A with DPR CEO George Pfeffer
"One of our methods focuses on identifying and nurturing innovative ideas internally. Key to this process is maintaining two-way communication between our innovation team and our skilled tradespeople in the field. Our in-house innovation team tests and validates ideas submitted by our employees. Over the past decade, we have supported more than 2,600 ideas."
Key Use Cases and the Disruptive Potential of AI: A Q&A With Pomerleau’s Majid Seydgar
"Generative AI technologies have significant potential to impact the construction industry. For instance, they can enhance design tools by optimizing architectural designs or processing 3D data, like point clouds, to facilitate progress monitoring on construction sites."
The Truth About Tech in Construction: A Q&A with Suffolk Construction CTO Jit Kee Chin
"If you compare construction to other industries you might find the construction industry is typically slower to adapt. However, there are situations where the construction industry has been able to adapt quickly. For example, the construction industry tends to adopt technologies quickly when those technologies drive efficiencies for the user. For instance, we have seen strong adoption of time-saving tools like Green Badger for simplifying the process of obtaining LEED certification."
Offsite Construction to Drive Sustainable and Scalable Urban Development: A Q&A With Assembly OSM CEO, Andrew Staniforth
"I think manufacturing generally leads to more standardization, but the tools that allow for manufacturing (eg. CATIA) allow for some interesting ways to enable customization. For example, CATIA is great for parametric design which means you can control interfaces, but change parameters to create “custom” products that are based on standardized details."
Talking Innovative Projects in the UAE, Boston, and More: A Q&A With Chief Innovator Amr Raafat
"Windover combined generative AI and generative design to develop a one-stop municipal ecosystem platform called AI-enabled Automated Plan Review System (BIM-AI) (Patent-Pending). The platform recently launched in UAE automates modeling 2D drawings drawing into a 3D model, including architectural, structural and mechanical to LOD 300with necessary details for code compliance checks. "
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