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Innovation First Friday: Unleashing a Culture of Innovative Thinkers

July 8, 2021
Staff
Gilbane’s Innovation Council has recently kicked off the Innovation First Friday series! This company-wide forum takes place on the first Friday of the month and focuses on celebrating innovations, knowledge-sharing, and emerging technology opportunities Gilbane is pursuing and/or implementing. As part of our commitment to driving new advancements and highest value outcomes, Innovation First Friday serves as platform to drive companywide communication, while unleashing a culture of innovative thinkers. This effort is led by Gilbane’s Innovation Council, a diverse group of innovative leaders from across all departments and service areas within the company.

Gilbane’s Innovation Council defines innovation as our commitment to deliver shared value for our clients, partners and our people. We continuously innovate to address industry and client challenges, operational deficiencies and process inefficiencies with scalable solutions that benefit all stakeholders.

Our Lean approach to problem solving is applied to our innovation methodology to unleash invention whether it be incremental process improvement, investment or utilization of technology and AI, or transformational ideas and concepts. This approach is underpinned by Design Thinking principles, a process to solve complex problems in a human-centric way, focusing on solutions that are technically feasible, economically viable, and desirable for the user.

Successful innovation starts with being very clear on the problems we are trying to solve. By marrying our ingrained Lean culture in root cause analyses with our Gilbane Innovation Accelerator model, we have a unique methodology for mining, prioritizing, and bringing ideas to life. We have developed a company-wide Idea Inventory tool, a transparent, real-time aggregator to show how we are progressing our innovation projects and memorializing experiments.

Every employee has access to this tool which helps us mitigate redundant work and connect dots to teams and people with similar ideas, concepts, and solutions. This tool enables us to measure success, identify areas where we might get stuck and deploy resources where needed. To date there are over 60 ideas in the Idea Inventory at various stages in the Accelerator from concept to scaling and celebrating.

Our innovation journey is well underway! The energy is palpable and enthusiasm across the company is growing at a rapid pace. We have seen the results manifested across our offices in our local business units and divisions as regional innovation centers are being established across our international footprint. Our goal is to see everyone participate in this cultural movement bringing big and small innovations to life and sharing those results for the betterment of our industry.



One Reply to “Innovation First Friday: Unleashing a Culture of Innovative Thinkers”

  1. Brett Thompson
    • July 10, 2021

    Love it! #GilbaneInnovates

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