The birth of a Lab
In 2014, GSE made the decision to get ahead of the digital revolution that has arrived in the building sector: BIM (Building Information Modeling). This digitalization of building design has paved the way for immense opportunities across the entire construction world. This is why we decided to accelerate our innovation by creating the GSE Lab in 2016. But what is a lab? This is the question I asked myself when our communications agency had this idea... The definition that I retained in my internet research is "a device allowing several people to create a large number of easy innovations to be experienced by users. But the meeting of digital technology and the construction sector is a bit like a hare and a tortoise: while an innovation in construction often takes more than 10 years to come out, digital tools are reinvented every year. And staying with my definition of the lab, I had a major problem: how to create a large number of innovations in this sector which is so reluctant to change and innovation and with an R&D budget which, traditionally in this sector , does not exceed 1% of turnover. The answer was quite quick to find, I could probably experiment with a lot of innovations on the 70 projects we have annually but certainly not invent them all!
Why is Open Innovation effective?
In fact, I learned this answer mainly from an inconclusive experience: in 2016, we developed an in-house real-time virtual reality tool to allow our clients to immerse themselves in their future building and configure their space in a simple and fun way. After 1 year of development (instead of the 6 months planned) and more than 100k€ of investment, we finally had our virtual reality tool... when we discovered a start-up which offered a tool quite similar to ours for a license of 1000€/year. Obviously our tailor-made solution was better at the start (because it was perfectly adapted to our needs…) but after a few months of use, we saw a very rapid improvement in the start-up's solution while our tool remained in its original state. It didn't take another 6 months to definitively put our development in the boxes. In 2020, we are using version 2.6 from this same start-up and I continue to be impressed by the speed of the developments!
The Open Innovation experience
In 2016, after 2 years of implementing BIM, we had already digitalized part of our design and plans. It is from this digital material that we realized that we now had a large number of needs and development opportunities such as: how to automate certain modeling or calculation tasks, how to bring our “digital material” to our projects, how can we bring this digital experience to our customers? Through trade shows, social networks, professional exchanges, we met a certain number of start-ups which offered interesting solutions in these areas and we started the famous POC (Proof of concept). I then learned that a POC meant for us, buying a solution that does not yet work and helping to develop it.
We tested quite a few digital solutions on our sites in 2017. Very few were mature but these tests carried out by the lab teams allowed us two important things:
- Instill internally and communicate externally on GSE's culture of innovation
- We gain real expertise in the state of the art in terms of digital tools for construction.
Finding your place in Open Innovation
From 2018 and after a few more or less successful POCs, I realized that testing all the solutions I discovered was taking more and more time and costing money. Even though the GSE Lab already had around twenty people, it is in reality an increasingly operational Lab that has been created because, once mature solutions have been identified and tested, their use on projects often requires the intervention by Lab experts. For example, these are the experts who, today, capture the building using photogrammetry to ensure that they deliver models as built or who calculate the carbon footprint of our buildings from the list of materials in the digital model.
To continue searching for the best innovation with less effort, we turned to open innovation structures: start-up studios, incubators, accelerators, etc. As a large SME or ETI, we did not have the means to create our own accelerator and we have chosen to join a few very specialized structures. We targeted different maturity levels of start-ups by integrating, for example, a start-up construction studio (the objective being to create start-ups based on common problems encountered on our construction sites and without an identified solution). We have also joined incubators/accelerators on very specific themes (SprintProject is one of them…). This open innovation solution allows us to have a global and up-to-date view of innovations (at least in France). It allows us to better identify innovative solutions as well as their maturity to launch operational tests with the right partners and at the right time. They sometimes also make it possible to pool the cost of certain tests. Finally, they allow us to give what, much more than money, now has value for start-ups: our feedback from field experience on their solutions and access to new customers or markets.
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