You have to Push a Hundred doors for One of them to Open, says Bouygues Head of Innovation
“Give me a lever long enough, and a fulcrum on which to place it and I can move the world.” — Archimedes
The construction world is moving and the lever that is moving it is made of 500+ construction tech startups that are hungry to storm into every project site across the world. The fulcrum is made of people like Julien Bourcerie, head of Open Innovation at Bouygues.
Julien is a Civil Engineer and a construction technologist who has championed hundreds of transformative ideas during his relatively short career. You could cut his passion with a knife, as he spoke to us on the promise of Circular Economy and the inevitability of the digital tornado coming to shake the industry.
Past experience needs new ideas, and new ideas need past experience
Julien left Colas in early 2013 as a young engineer to start his own company, Excesterra. He had the vision to manage site materials more efficiently and used to tour Paris with his bike visiting hundreds of project sites to pitch his idea.
He learned a hard lesson, fast. Despite his sheer passion and brilliant ideas on Circular Economy, he got stuck somewhere between the Ministries and Committees in France, as he needed their buy-in for his venture to grow. Julien realized he wasn’t experienced enough to handle the political conversation and decided to move on. He gracefully took the learnings from Excesterra and moved to Bouygues a few months later to get exactly that.
Experiencing the birth of construction technology
2007 saw the advent of the smartphone with Apple’s release of the iPhone and by 2012 a new wave of field tech startups started to emerge. By joining the Bouygues Innovation team in 2013, Julien walked into the cockpit of a rocket just at the right time, moments before it was about to take off, and it did. Bouygues is now №5 on the 2020 International ENR List and unquestionably one of the contractors unblinking to the digital reality sweeping away the “this is how we’ve always done it” narrative.
How to handle NOs (hint: it’s quite simple)
Julien faced many NOs in his career as he introduced new ideas and technologies into the building sites. Imbued with a never-give-up attitude, and the stubborn, coherent ethos inherited from his entrepreneurial days, he keeps knocking on doors no matter what. As he humbly points out “I push a hundred doors, knowing that one or two will open’’. Julien’s 300+ startup cooperations at Bouygues speak for themselves and give a hint that he clearly has an eye for solutions that work.
Soon, you won’t have a choice but to change
Julien spends every working minute in the office communicating the avalanche of regulations, requirements, and pressures coming construction’s way over the next five to ten years. Projects keep getting more complex, key materials like uranium and copper will be in shortage, sustainability pressures tighten and client expectations rise, claims Julien. As he asserts “we won’t be able to build in the same way we have built so far” and urgently points to the need to “open people’s eyes” to the tsunami of changes coming our way.
When asked about what he’d like to see in the future for construction, Julien musters all the optimism he can handle and utters the one thing that is perhaps on everyone’s mind: “More. Quality.”
Listen to Julien’s story below:
