Durham School Distinguished Lecture

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“Negotiating Innovation: Teams, Technologies, and How Industries Change”

Dr. Carrie Sturts Dossick
P.D. Koon Professor of Construction Management and Associate Dean for Research, College of Built Environments 
University of Washington

Friday, December 8, 2023
12:00PM:  Boxed lunches available
12:15PM - 1:15 PM: Presentation
Peter Kiewit Institute Room 160 (Omaha), Nebraska Hall Room 175 (Lincoln), or Zoom

Please use the form below to RSVP for lunch or the Zoom link by Tuesday, December 5, 2023 at 5 PM.

This talk is a culmination of over 2 decades of research that centers around the construction industry’s adoption of emerging technologies such as Building Information Management (BIM), Virtual Reality (VR), and more recently Digital Twins. In this talk, we will provide an in-depth look at a study of BIM and Collaboration that illustrates change across a complex industry. This research is a long-standing collaboration between engineers and social scientists that enables us to understand the domain of construction engineering and management while being able to incorporate and grapple with complex social phenomena. The culmination of this work results in a model of innovation we title “Negotiating Innovation” that explains the complex social processes of how technological change happens in a networked industry, such as construction. This model has three main concepts: Futuring Work, Reconfiguring Practices, and Rewriting Institutions. Individuals, teams, and companies engage in each of these innovation processes at different levels: industry, company, and team level. In these ways, we argue that innovation is a process of negotiation that is often unstructured and occurs across hundreds of teams and projects. In these ways, new practices evolve across the industry over time.

Professor Carrie Sturts Dossick, P.E. is a Professor of Construction Management and the Associate Dean of Research in the College of Built Environments, University of Washington. Dr. Dossick also holds an adjunct professor appointment in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and is currently the Vice-Chair of the National BIM Standard -US Planning Committee. Dr. Dossick co-directs the Communication, Technology, and Organizational Practices lab in the Center for Education and Research in Construction (CERC). Dr. Dossick has over two decades of research and teaching experience focused on emerging collaboration methods and technologies such as Building Information Modeling (BIM), Virtual Reality, and Digital Twins. She is an active member of the National Institute of Building Sciences BIM Council, and the Academic Interoperability Coalition (AiC). Recent research and teaching projects include Cybersecurity for Large Institutional Owners, a Pankow-funded project on Owner Decision-making and Project Delivery, The Project BIM Requirements Module for the National BIM Standard US, an Introduction to BIM for Construction Management Certificate with Skanska, a new online Certificate for digital fabrication workflows for concrete formwork with Turner Construction, and the IB Index with the University of Technology Sydney, BIM Standards and Processes for the Port of Seattle, the use of Virtual Reality for Facilities Management Training, and BIM workflows for Preconstruction Services including Recent Technical Publications. She has received funding from the National Science Foundation, U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Education, General Services Administration, Mechanical Contractors Association of Western Washington, Sound Transit, Skanska USA Building, Mortenson Company, University of Washington Royalty Research Fund, University of Washington Capital Projects and Facilities services.