So the day has finally arrived. We formally announced Syska Innovations LLC, a subsidiary of SH Group, to the world. And what better way to kick off the launch than with a firm-wide innovation challenge?
Our inaugural Idea-a-thon, which kicked off March 10th is a three-week internal corporate competition for Syska Hennessy employees to imagine, develop, and share their ideas for innovation projects. Employees with a great idea will be mentored by innovation coaches – Syska Hennessy employees who have been trained to develop and communicate the nuts-and-bolts value and potential of innovation applied to engineering consulting. Sponsored ideas will then be submitted for executive review through Syska Hennessy’s innovation management portal, where they will be evaluated and scored. We’ll advance as many as possible, turning them into funded managed innovation projects. On March 31, 2022, the day the competition closes, we’ll award prizes to the most promising projects.
The Syska Innovations Idea-a-thon is our way of telling our staff that innovation is important for our company. What really excites me is that the Idea-a-thon is not only an event with prizes, but it also reflects a new, ongoing process at Syska Hennessy. Our people know our work best, and we want to put them in control of innovation. The Idea-a-thon supports the concept of technology transfer between digital trends influencing the world and smart, engaged professionals with the vision to apply it to complicated, human-focused industry. The ideation, mentorship, evaluation, approval, and management processes we’re using for the Idea-a-thon will become a permanent part of our corporate culture.
It took more than a year’s worth of work to make the Syska (Hennessy) Innovations Idea-a-thon and our in-house corporate innovation program a reality. Although Syska Innovations was originally formed to invest in seed-stage companies and pilot their software and products, we have added a new perspective by promoting ideation and technology development within Syska Hennessy. Stay tuned for more to come on what that process looks like.
Our commitment to investing time, money, and intellectual capital into innovation reflects our belief that digital transformation in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry will start from within companies while being enabled by outside technology. As we create an engaging, managed approach to innovation at Syska Hennessy, we think our project partners and clients will see a difference. Our engineers already implement innovation on our projects, and we know our clients see how innovation changes outcomes. But Syska’s corporate innovation program will broaden, expand, and improve our innovation so a great idea first applied on a project in San Francisco or Seattle will more quickly become standard practice in New York City, Boston, and every place where Syska Hennessy projects are underway.