What To Build: Daniel Ramirez (Director of Innovation, Skanska CDUS)
Conversation with Daniel Ramirez, Director of Innovation at Skanska CDUS. We chat about his interest in generative design, and the two areas that Skanska is currently focused on: qualitative demographic data analysis and tenant engagement platforms.
1. Tell us about yourself, where you currently work, and your path on getting there.
I work for Skanska USA Commercial Development as the Director of Innovation. Skanska is a multinational development and construction company with US headquarters in New York and is the seventh largest construction company in the world.
My current role feels like a natural dovetailing of my past experiences and the current challenges/ opportunities in the development and construction process. I started my career as an architect and have always gravitated to how technology can improve our processes and the user experience in buildings. In addition to my design background, I have substantial experience in manufacturing automation (CW Keller) and the startup environment (i.e., Katerra). In my current role at Skanska, I bring these past experiences to evaluate how technology can improve our processes and keep Skanska at the forefront of developing first in class customer experiences in our developments.
2. Tell us about your role and what your mandate is and how this specifically relates to working with startups?
I classify my role as part process and part product driven.
Process: driving a cultural shift within the organization to push for bottom up innovation vs. top-down decision making, sourcing the best ideas across our national platform for incremental change improvement and changing ideas around risk mitigation and how we scope projects.
Product: looking across the entire landscape to find technologies that can help our business. Driving decision-making based upon the effectiveness for our platform through evaluating technologies that fit with our business.
We try to solve problems through carefully constructed pilots that we hope to shape into larger initiatives. We look for good partners and evaluate how well they align with our business. For us, the personal engagement with the startup team is as equally important as the actual product or technology.
3. What are some of the interesting types of projects that you’re currently doing with startups?
Two areas that we’re going after:
a) Data analytics: We are currently utilizing qualitative demographic data: data that is more nuanced and less black and white. In conjunction with quantitative datasets (such as sales/rent comps and transactions) we want to use qualitative datasets (including demographic makeup, commuting patterns and retail activity) to further analyze our markets and inform decisions addressing dynamic customer needs (such as types of amenities and potential retail partners).
b) Tenant engagement: We’re evaluating multiple tenant engagement platforms to augment our buildings. Phones have become the primary user interface for our customers and we’re continuously working to improve the customer experience by creating a frictionless connection between the physical and digital asset. By integrating parking, access control, visitor management and amenities bookings among other services, we are allowing our tenants to leverage all that our buildings have to offer and creating better working and living experiences. We are also evaluating how this is translated into real value for our customers. Our current hypothesis is that more engaged commercial tenants provide value both through the retention of talent as well as overall productivity. Through continued adoption and analysis of Tenant Engagement we can begin to pull actionable anonymous data that benefits current assets and helps us plan future development projects.
4. What number of these projects move into production? By what criteria? One of the challenges we see startups facing is how to move a customer from pilot to production.
Beyond the technology itself, we look at how well the startup addressed their problem statement. We also evaluate for a larger market fit — this is tricky because each regional market has its own specific needs, its own teams, etc. In other words, in order to roll something out nationally there needs to be a common need the product/service addresses universally across all our markets.
We need to ask ourselves: Do we need to make any specific changes for each market? How is each of our teams going to respond to it? Is it differentiated beyond what our competitors are doing? Is it easy to use? It doesn’t matter how great the technology is, if it’s not intuitive and easy to deploy our teams won’t use it.
5. What are the major challenges in your industry these days, and specifically ones that you think can be addressed by the right type of AI and or robotics application? Can you give some detailed examples?
One big challenge specific to robotics is human-less reality capture. Right now we can laser scan our spaces, but that’s a human deployed solution. How can we accurately record tracking without humans? Is there a way to do this autonomously and continuously with 360 cameras or LIDAR, perhaps via an AI and robotics solution? And how to then process and share the relevant data with key stakeholders? That’s a resource intensive process.
Can we then scale the collected data across the entire development cycle? First you use this data in construction for coordination and to understand project progress (i.e. schedule creep, etc.) but then this information can provide value down the line as well: understanding building operations via a digital twin model, all the way through leasing and marketing and building performance. We want to drive as much value as we can out of that one application.
If a solution has value across the entire development cycle, that makes it a lot easier for us to buy versus it being a siloed solution. However, proving out that return on investment can be difficult.
We also have a lot of historical data that we want to leverage. For example, it would be great to analyze how historical projects have proceeded based on initial designs (i.e., schedule, cost, building type) and see if we can predict future project success based off such information. Perhaps we can use past information to help us avoid potential losses by feeding such input into the earlier pre-construction and design stages of projects.
6. What type of startup would you be most excited to see?
I find the generative design space to be really interesting, but I haven’t seen anything to date that makes it commercially convincing. I’ve seen people doing some stuff with basic environments and pro forma but not going deep into the nuances of overall construction costs; this is a very hard problem to solve that requires a substantial dataset.
If it were possible to use such generative designs to feed into a costing exercise for better understanding prices, environmental impacts, etc. at the earliest stages of a project that would be a massive value add.
7. What should startups know about your industry before going in? What nuances or details about the industry are not so apparent from someone looking in?
There’s a tendency for people to think development and construction is only a numbers driven game. We have a commitment to designing and creating spaces that enable our customers to thrive as well as attract and retain top talent. Ideas, technologies, and products that enhance that promise are of significant interest. There’s a lot of creativity in our field.
It’s also important to really try to understand the problem versus being seduced by the technology side of what you’re working on.
8. Lastly, any recommended resources / reading (ex. Industry conferences, publications, experts to follow, etc.) for startups looking to build in your space?
Urban Land Institute: tons of content
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC): good content specific to real estate, what drives decisions in this industry
CRETech: helps to distill a lot of industry information
