The construction industry must overcome its conservative attitude towards new tech

First published by New Civil Engineer on 27 September 2023. 

The construction industry relies on a large amount of basic technology which has been around for a long time. It rightly prizes tried and tested technology that has been used on site and has proved reliable, and is known for a somewhat conservative attitude towards new tech. 

However, we at RSK have seen very positive responses from industry players to innovations which have managed to reach a reasonably high Technology Readiness Level, including by providing support to innovators at the development stage.  

For example, we have seen our contractor clients enable innovators to have access to the support that they need to develop technology, access to a working site to trial the tech, and some financial support through part payment for the use of tech that is being trailed on site. Some large client organisations are very open to new tech being trialled on their projects, particularly those which have set up their own new technology funds.  

These types of opportunities are particularly appropriate for tech that has already been developed to a level at which there is a meaningful experiment or trial survey to do. If the contractor likes the tech during the trial, the innovator will then face the question of whether the contractor will actually include it in future work and tell its projects to use the tech, or whether it will return to tried and tested methods.  

Some of the larger construction companies now have an innovation agenda. Generally, the bigger organisations have more enthusiasm and bandwidth to listen to the pitches of new tech innovators. Getting a piece of new tech accepted, adopted by a partner and into the supply chain does face higher – though not unfair – barriers. The innovator company will need to demonstrate in which situation it is the best technology, how reliable it is, what its limitations are, and it will need to be prepared to discuss whether there are other technologies that in some circumstances would be more practical and pragmatic. This is an essential pathway to getting new tech adopted.  

For example, we have had a tier one contractor client both trial and adopt a piece of new tech that we developed, one which uses muon technology to measure the amount of cosmic rays that are coming from space through the ground into a tunnel. The way in which muon particles penetrate the earth allows the device to map features in the ground between the tunnel and the surface, including some of the construction detail of how the tunnel was created.  This generates more reliable information that is far less time consuming to obtain than through the tradition method of trying to find lost shafts and characterise their condition by intrusively drilling into the crown of the tunnel vertically every couple of metres. As with other geophysical mapping techniques, it has a much lower carbon footprint than deploying heavy plant to a site.  

However, even relatively established technologies are not always used as often or as well as they should be, often because experienced industry players have had bad experiences with them in the past. For example, Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) was met with some excitement when it was promoted 30 years ago, but was too often oversold and used badly. The result is that GPR has a mixed reputation even though it is now fairly ubiquitous. The solution for achieving this widespread use of GPR was to develop standards and specifications for it.  

It’s also crucial to make sure that the people who are bringing new tech to sites are genuine experts in it. We should expect the same qualifications in a consultant geophysicist as in a consultant geotechnical engineer or a structural engineer. But ultimately, we just need to keep working to bring the new technology through and demonstrate its practical value on a project by project basis. This will require all parties to be open to collaboration on new innovations, and for those promoting new technology to be transparent and thorough in demonstrating its capabilities and benchmarking their advantages and disadvantages against existing solutions. In this way the new technology which the construction industry so badly needs in the current environment, to save time and money, can be reliably delivered.  

George Tuckwell is director of geosciences and engineering and innovation lead at RSK Group.