Get creative

So what is it to be innovative? If its recent Queen's Award is any yardstick, then the offices of consultant Whitbybird are a good place to start looking for answers. Slotted alongside all those creative media types in London's West End, open-collared, casually attired staff populate open plan office space adorned with lilac - yes, lilac - paint on the occasional pillar.

It is not that relaxed dress codes and unconventional colour schemes are alien to every other firm in the industry but here they are the first layer of a more than just skin-deep attempt at banishing the brown suit and brogues image that lingers around the word ‘engineer' like a bad smell. There is a deep-rooted culture of innovation at Whitbybird in both the way it delivers projects and how its business is run. It seems to work. Its victory in a category usually dominated by innovation in new products was achieved for its ‘engineering approach'.

"We've been pushing the boundaries of engineering," says director Mark Whitby. "We wanted to make the process of doing this sort of work more fun. There were potential commercial benefits but the fundamental aim was to create an environment in which people could feel comfortable about the work they were doing."

Whitby says innovation is key to any business but particularly construction: "If you're not ahead of it you get left behind. The benefits are multi-faceted: it keeps your staff interested, it keeps your business moving forward, it gives you excellent links with the industry through doing research projects with companies. You get to know them and their processes better and therefore you can provide them with information that is more helpful to them and drives value for your clients."

There is more to a creative environment than office layout, although it helps because it makes it easier for staff to approach senior people with ideas. The most important element of Whitbybird's culture is that the firm encourages and welcomes new ideas, says marketing director Will Stevens.

Ideas blossom

"If someone has an idea, no matter what level of the business they are at, our attitude is that if it's a good idea, we have got to go with it," Stevens says. "It is an attitude that has blossomed into the research that we do - so it's a case of being inspired by your work."

Mark Whitby says the key to allowing his staff to adopt innovative attitudes was to operate a good system of management that allowed people to get on with the engineering, rather than managing. "We arrived on the scene at the same time as computers and computer literate people. We realised that if we used computers well they could help us manage the business, so we developed systems that could help us manage the business of doing engineering. We're keen that these systems make it more possible for people to engage in engineering. It has meant that people don't get promoted with us to become managers, they get promoted and become more and more of an engineer."

Such has been the success of the management software that the practice built a separate company around it which has now been sold on. The system is now used by more than 40 other firms.

We’ve been pushing the boundaries of engineering. We wanted to make the process of doing this sort of work more fun

Mark Whitby, whitbybird

If there is an issue to be discussed, a task group is formed consisting of staff at every level of the business - from graduate to director. "The task group is key to how we work," says Stevens. "It enables us to constantly draw in opinion from our staff to direct the business and you can actually see lots of ideas coming up through the ranks that way." Task groups range in topic from the heavy technical, such as building regulations, to social events. Some come and go. What they have in common, says Stevens, is that because they are a mixed group of people meeting occasionally they aren't hierarchical, so everyone can express their views.

Experimental

So you have generated some good ideas but how does that translate into innovation? It is not a question of a light bulb suddenly flicking on and an idea coming to fruition. It is a lengthy process, at the start of which, says Stevens, is experimentation: "We are always experimenting on a small scale. We develop a confidence through what we can achieve and what the market can achieve, then we take those smaller-scale projects and translate them onto a larger scale. The knowledge you gain from the experimentation is valuable when you come to doing it for real and the confidence it gives us means we can take that one step further and present challenges to the industry."

The design process in construction also lends itself to innovation: "The way you design in our business is different from the product world," says Whitby. "You don't know what all the problems are on a project when you start out because you can't afford to test it against everything. So you try all these ideas and the opportunity to literally innovate comes from trying an idea and following it through. You discover that that idea actually solves a problem you didn't even know existed."

When it came to putting together its submission for the Queen's Award, Stevens says it was difficult to pin down exactly what innovation was. Eventually they decided that the best way to illustrate innovation was to show how new ideas were taken from one project to the next by way of an innovation timeline. "It was a design tool for what we would present to the Queen's Award. It looks at projects and research that we've done and shows how one thing leads to another, how information is passed from project to project and how our innovations have continued to grow." Another indicator is the positive reaction from other parts of the industry to ideas you have. Whitby says: "We draw on our contacts in the client and contracting world to check ideas that we are developing and it shows that you're really on to something that is going to add value when those people want to be involved in something you're doing which might be a bit ‘out there' - that's when you know it's going to work."

It is an approach that has won a large amount of repeat business and has attracted a high calibre of engineers to the practice. Whitby says: "We discovered that the trades were very receptive to our ideas because we were allowing them to do more with less. They priced our jobs very aggressively and we built a whole market share in commercial buildings as a result of our aim to deliver the product better than others, and that's not just where price is concerned.

"We are at a point now where we think three RFIs on a project are a lot whereas in the past it would have been 300.The feedback we got from our trades was that they were having more fun doing our jobs, our people were having more fun, the architects were finding it equally demanding and a better way of working because we were asking the right questions earlier on in the process, so the whole thing produced a better product."