Winning more overseas work demands . . . - New acts of union

Dangling a carrot before the mules of construction, a new report tells of great fortune to be found overseas - if more brain power is invested in technology.

Coming at a time when clients and the Government have been encouraging - somewhat aggressively at times - better performance from UK construction, the report from the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) should fall on fertile ground.

Yet, while it builds upon the spirit of the times and points to wider horizons, its focus is not on how commercial success can be won through business nous but on the merits of investing in technology - for which construction is not renowned.

Know-how

The ICE report Thriving in a global market: Technology strategies for UK Civil Engineering Exports argues that the industry should be pushing harder to sell know-how, not brawn. Produced as a response to the Government's Foresight initiative on ways to boost exports, the report and accompanying CD-ROM deals with a number of areas: trends in world markets, ways to support technology development, and action needed from industry and Government.

The prime objective of the report is to "change the attitudes of those engaged in setting research priorities and allocating resources", it says. The idea was to bang the drum about the arguments for and merits of technology in general, not to identify specific technologies. The studies were tackled through a series of workshops and interviews across the UK.

While rebutting the suggestion that the report is a consultant-friendly campaign from what is often perceived as a consultants' club - the ICE - its assistant director John Bennett says: "We were not as successful as we would like to have been in getting major contractors, so there is an over-representation of consultants" in the Government-supported study.

Still, former head of Amec and the present ICE president Sir Alan Cockshaw, backs the message of the report: improving technological ability will improve business success. He draws upon his North Sea contracting experience to drive the message.

But given the historic inertia of the industry, supporters of the campaigning report have an uphill battle ahead. Bennett, who was part of the study team, says that the report generated a point of debate among many people last week over the question: "In how many boardrooms will the issue and value of technology form the basis of discussion?" The consensus, he says, is "precious few".

hurdle

The drive to boost technology research has a further hurdle. Trouble is brewing for UK construction with the shift from public to private funding of projects, according to Professor Roger Flanagan of Reading University, who was also on the study group.

Speaking at the ICE's Unwin lecture earlier this year, Flanagan said that as the public sector share of the construction pie diminishes so does the traditional testing bed for new technologies - the private sector is too risk-averse, he says.

In the face of such challenges and given the benefits that can be won from improved and new technology, the report calls for the problem to be addressed. It gives a number of recommendation and messages, and Bennett says that the issues raised by the report will be carried forward in debate and partly using the ICE web site [http://www.ice.org.uk/ exports/].

But technology only gets a chance to thrive when based on a sound business footing, and this is an area that the report does not address as it might, although it acknowledges the leverage that the UK's private finance experience can give in new markets as public sector money dries up.

Like the battery of firms who prospered overseas on the back of experience of electricity privatisation, construction has home grown skills and experience to sell abroad.

But private finance is not enough - there is more to business success overseas than PFI, especially as UK firms are too small to take on foreign firms on the international stage. Size matters and so the idea of multi-disciplinary partnerships is an implicit argument from the ICE report (See The empire's New Clothes, right), although it is not one of the report's recommendations. Yet, such new approaches to business "underlie the discussion", says Bennett.