Adrian La Porta.

I’ve worked through three different governments - Labour, Coalition and Conservative - but through them all there has been an increasing focus on the importance of infrastructure and transforming construction.. One thing I’ve noticed through this period is that we tend to think of ourselves in the engineering community as being innovators.We think we're quite good at working out what needs doing, but actually, the real skill, and one of the biggest lessons I’ve learned during my time in government, is that working out what to do can be quite easy.

It's working out how to get it done that becomes hard.. At present, our focus is on transforming construction into a more future-facing sector.We need to ask important questions about how to make it more inclusive and representative of the society it serves.. To begin, it’s essential to recognise that we can’t achieve our goals working in isolation.Problems like carbon emissions, poor build quality, labour shortages and the housing crisis - they can all be improved if we collectively refocus our energies and unify our processes.

The creation of the Construction Innovation Hub is a response to this need.The Hub aims to overcome the industry’s current fragmentation and adopt a new, data-driven, industrialised construction approach.

The goal is to harmonise, digitalise and rationalise demand across industry projects and programmes.

By creating standardised products and components, driven by Design for Value principles and Platform construction methodologies, we can harness the benefits of manufacturing and DfMA for the good of the industry and wider society..Customers can leverage the benefits of Ikea (economies of scale) while still getting a bespoke outcome.

This addresses one of the concerns that is often raised about Platforms and modern methods of construction more generally – the spectre of ‘cookie cutter’ buildings and identical assets.Manufacturers can spend less time on the ‘bulk’ components and focus their efforts on the ‘project specific’ parts, and spend more time with customers understanding their individual needs.

This is analogous with use of configurators and Platforms – designers can put more effort into the project specific and value-adding design and less into the documentation of the ‘chassis’.. Can we do this?What should our digital marketplace look like?.