Turner Construction Company Holds Fifth Innovation Summit

The event brought 225 Turner colleagues together with business and industry thought leaders to exchange ideas and collaborate around the theme of Courageous Innovation: Exploring What Could Be. 
 
Presentations from start-up founders and CEO’s revealed how the industry is being transformed by innovations in artificial intelligence, business intelligence, 3D printing, architecture, disruptive manufacturing processes, and robotics. Speakers included Smartvid.IO CEO Josh Kanner, Versatile Natures CEO Meirav Oren, Reconstruct CEO Zak MacRunnels, AI SpaceFactory CEO David Malott, BLOX CEO Chris Giattina, and Dusty Robotics CEO Tessa Lau. 

The program featured presentations on innovating through intrapreneurship by Microsoft's former Chief Xbox Officer Robbie Bach; on a transformative process for rapidly prototyping and testing new ideas from New York Times bestseller Jake Knapp, on facilitating disruptive innovation from within from Boeing HorizonX Investing Director Beckett Jackson; and on how to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset from PlanGrid co-founder and CEO Tracy Young.  Daniel Guillory, Head of Global Diversity & Inclusion at Autodesk, discussed how diversity is essential to the creative process and relayed a model for advancing innovation using a founder’s mindset.

Craig McGrory, Group General Manager Transformation & Digitization at CIMIC introduced HOCHTIEF's global innovation initiative whose purpose is to leverage intelligent technologies to enhance the efficiency and quality of project delivery.

Participants and sponsors of Turner’s Innovation Challenge – a program which provides a structured path to bring great ideas from conceptualization to companywide adoption – presented on innovative technologies and processes being explored at Turner. Attendees learned how the ongoing Innovation Challenge is helping Turner advance its understanding and utilization of artificial intelligence; use data to work smarter through business intelligence; explore new applications for prefabrication and modularization; enhance productivity through transformative process improvements; and develop engineered solutions for the disaster resilience and recovery organization SBP.

Showcasing successful intrapreneurial ventures already underway at Turner, the programs final presentation series featured talks on the Turner Accelerated Payment Program™ which gives subcontractors the opportunity to receive accelerated payments thereby improving their cash flow and strengthening their balance sheets; The Turner Engineering Group which provides skill, oversight, and analysis to optimize project design and solve design-related challenges; and Turner’s Self-Perform Operations which add value through the targeted use of skilled in-house labor forces.

“The summits enthusiastic and visionary programming serves to motivate attendees to continuously drive positive change for Turner and the broader industry,” said Jim Barrett, vice president and chief innovation officer. “The summit is an important part of Turner’s cycle of innovation development and supports our mission to be an innovation leader that creates significant and measurable new value to our clients and stakeholders.”