Why we must overcome design conservatism to embrace innovation in construction

By Victoria Sherwood, Chief Commercial Officer

Incremental innovation dominates the construction industry in 2026. The lowest risk pathway is chosen because of conservatism and an industry-wide default to familiar specs, materials and processes.

This isn’t simply an engineering problem; it’s a structural one. Even when a new material demonstrably delivers on cost, time and quality, the engineer who specifies it carries the burden of proof, the documentation risk, the liability exposure, and the reputational damage if anything goes wrong downstream. The engineer who copies the previous spec carries none of that. The incentive to be conservative isn’t irrational. It’s the only rational response to a system that has quietly institutionalised risk concentration at the point of specification.

Until the industry is honest about that, and until risk is genuinely shared across the supply chain rather than silently offloaded onto the person holding the pen, conversations about collaboration and innovation will stagnate.

Without change, margins will keep tightening, companies will keep failing, and the productivity gap will remain exactly where it has been for the past two decades.

Why we created SENSE Solutions®

Innovation needs to tick multiple boxes simultaneously, including cost, constructability, safety and carbon. That’s why we developed SENSE Solutions®: not as a product looking for a problem, but as a response to the specific productivity, efficiency and carbon challenges the industry is facing.

But a better product isn’t enough if it’s still hard to specify, difficult to price accurately and time-consuming to report on. SENSE Solutions® is designed to remove those barriers too, giving engineers the evidence base to defend the decision, giving commercial teams visibility over costs that traditionally don’t appear until it’s too late, and giving project teams carbon data in a form they can actually use.

On specification confidence. The liability question doesn’t disappear because a product is better. It disappears when the evidence base is strong enough to make the decision defensible. SENSE Solutions® provides the accredited testing, performance data and documented engineering rationale that sign-off requires. This gives engineers actual cover, not just a compelling pitch.

On commercial visibility. Hidden costs in steel supply don’t appear on the line item where the specification was made. They appear later, such as wrong grades on site, non-conforming material, sequencing failures leaving crews idle, and are absorbed as variations and written off as the normal cost of doing business. SENSE Solutions’ digital traceability and AI-assisted tracking makes that chain of accountability visible before it becomes a cost, not after.

On decarbonisation reporting. Carbon data is only useful if project teams can actually use it. Our EPDs are aggregated by material quantity to produce a GWP figure that feeds directly into project-level carbon reporting frameworks, and can be pulled straight into existing dashboards, eliminating the manual collection burden that currently falls on subcontractors and suppliers across the supply chain.

What the industry needs to change

SENSE Solutions® addresses what we can control as a supplier. But the accountability structure that suppresses innovation is broader and more deeply entrenched that any product can fix.

Engagement needs to occur from the start: We need to allow the space for engineers to explore alternatives, rather than being locked into pre-determined specifications. Alliance and target cost contracting models offer a more promising structural environment, and can allow us to reframe the question from “who bears the risk?” to “how do we reduce risk across the project as a whole?”.

Professional indemnity needs to be part of the conversation: PI insurance is the silent co-author of every specification decision. Engineers aren’t just weighing technical merit, they’re weighing personal liability exposure against a system that prices coverage on conformance to established practice. Until standards, bodies, clients and insurers develop frameworks that give engineers defensible cover for evidence-based innovation, the incentive to be conservative will remain stronger than any innovation ambition stated in a project brief.

Supplier expertise needs to be embedded earlier and at a portfolio level: Project-level engagement, late in design, is too little too late. The structural change that would make the biggest difference to specification outcomes is supplier engagement at a business and program level at the beginning of the lifecycle, where it can shape the brief rather than respond to it.

It’s time for different conversations

Innovation won’t embed itself into construction through goodwill alone. Research consistently shows that by the time detailed design is underway, the majority of project cost is already committed, meaning specification decisions made early, often conservatively, determine project outcomes more than any innovation conversation that follows. The problem isn’t who is making those decisions. It’s the system they’re made within.

The frameworks for change already exist. Alliance and target cost contracting models redistribute risk across the supply chain, removing the incentive to default to the conservative option. Early contractor involvement (ECI) models create the space for better specification decisions before structural assumptions are locked in, something traditional design and construct (D&C) contracts rarely allow. Performance-based specifications shift the question from “does this conform to the standard?” to “does this perform to the requirement?”. All are proven in this industry and others. What’s missing is the willingness to make them the norm rather than the exception.

I joined the InfraBuild executive team because I believe the steel industry can deliver differently, and because Australia’s $242 billion infrastructure pipeline deserves better than the productivity trajectory we’re currently on.

SENSE Solutions® is our contribution to shifting the dial on productivity in construction. The harder work however is the conversation the industry needs to have about the system that makes it difficult in the first place. At InfraBuild, we’re ready to have it!