Closer collaboration needed to drive innovation take-up, industry told ahead of Connected Places Summit 2026

UK construction struggles to scale and adopt new technologies effectively despite a thriving innovation sector, the industry has been told.

Geoffrey Stevens, Connected Places Catapult director of built environment and urbanism, said large construction and infrastructure clients would only reap the benefits of the wide range of new technologies on offer if they worked more closely together.

Stevens was speaking ahead of the Connected Places Summit, a two-day conference which starts today in Paternoster Square in the heart of the City of London. The conference is bringing together innovators across the built environment with major clients including Transport for London, HS2 and Sizewell C.

The annual conference is run by Connected Places Catapult, which arranges testing projects and demonstrators which seek to de-risk the uptake of new technologies which are not yet widely used by industry organisations.

An example is calcined clay, a low-carbon alternative to cement which has gained industry recognition but is seldom used because of a lack of infrastructure needed to produce it.

Stevens said: “In the UK, we’re pretty good at innovation. There’s loads of great technologies and solutions out there. What we’re not necessarily good at is adopting them at scale.”

He is calling for major clients who are all facing the same challenges, including many of the delivery bodies overseeing projects on the government’s 10-year infrastructure pipeline, to collaborate more closely to speed up the development of new practices.

In the case of calcined clay, more bulking plants would need to be built in the UK before production can be scaled up. 

“In order to make the case for that, there needs to be a strong market signal connecting the demand to the supply,” Stevens said. “And to do that, you need to work together. These are bigger than one project. It cuts across the whole sector, and then you can create real demand and real impetus to innovate.”

Examples of new approaches championed by Connected Places Catapult include digital monitoring of concrete, which clients including the Department for Transport and Sizewell C have agreed to adopt.

The technology monitors the consistency of concrete during its journey to a site, replacing the traditional slump test - where a bucket is filled with newly arrived concrete and tipped upside down to measure how far it spreads.

“By creating that market signal and acceptance that that could be business as usual, we managed to get them all to agree, and [digital concrete monitoring] is now becoming business as usual,” Stevens said.

He added: “It’s about de-risking [the practice of] doing things differently, and de-risking by doing it together with others, but also by testing it in a small scale first, and knowing that it works, having that proof and confidence that you can adopt something.”

This week’s conference comes as firms across the built environment weigh the impact of the Iran conflict on inflation and how rising energy prices could affect material costs and the timing of interest rate cuts.

Stevens said the risk of rising prices adds further pressure on businesses to reduce costs and deliver increased productivity, but admitted that firms looking to tighten their belts may be less willing to invest in new technology.

“That’s why collaborative innovation becomes all the more important,“ he said, adding “I think if people are potentially becoming more cautious about investing themselves, perhaps they would be more willing for investing together in innovation, doing it collaboratively.”

Keynote speakers at the Connected Places Summit will include Transport for London commissioner Andy Lord, HS2 director of stations Huw Edwards, Places for London chief executive Graeme Craig and Mott MacDonald global cities lead Clare Wildfire.