Accelerate to Innovate with CIOB and BRE

Digital innovators with fresh ideas for apps, software tools or digital technologies for construction are invited to showcase their ideas to the industry at a new CIOB and BRE-backed event – Accelerate to Innovate. 

While digital innovation is seen as crucial to the industry’s future, innovators with fresh ideas often work in small, isolated teams and find it difficult to make headway in a fragmented industry.

Accelerate to Innovate will help selected teams speed up the process of developing their ideas and plotting a pathway to future success – while gaining valuable media exposure among the readership of Construction Manager, BIM+ and the BRE’s Building4Change. 

Individuals, collaborators or groups with a prototype innovation or a well-researched premise are invited to submit a 500-word application to the Accelerate to Innovate team by Thursday 24 March. Teams selected by the assessment panel from this open call will join winners of the CIOB’s Innovation and Research Awards 2015, who are hoping to take their ideas from research labs or field trials to commercial roll-out.

At the event, to be held at the BRE in Watford on 19 April, a team of high-calibre “mentors” from the industry will coach teams on how to progress their ideas, technically and commercially, to gain wider take-up in the industry.

Innovators selected to participate will be paired with experienced mentors from the industry, including Rennie Chadwick, innovation and performance director at contractor Osborne, and senior representatives from the BIM Task Group and leading Tier 1 contractors. 

Mentors will coach innovators on how to strengthen their proposal, and pitch their ideas to investors, backers and future clients in the construction sector.