Seven men carrying one 140kg steel bar, on the biggest infrastructure project in Britain. The founder of Laing O’Rourke saw it and concluded that in fifty years, nothing had changed.
This week’s Executive Briefing is about the man he hired to fix it. Chetan Kotur designed cars at Volvo, launched Polestar globally, then spent three and a half years looking at construction with outsider’s eyes. At our private fireside in London this week, he shared his diagnosis on the record for the first time.
In this briefing:
- The industry that innovates daily or dies, versus the industry that fears innovation might kill it
- Why nobody in construction checks what competitors are doing (and what Polestar did instead)
- 56% of construction injuries are musculoskeletal. No other industry still accepts this
- Hinkley Point C: how a precision rebar factory turned a month of work into a single shift
- The pattern across Europe: Laing O’Rourke’s lab, Bouygues’ Scale One, Vinci’s hired field, and why testing grounds are multiplying as construction’s innovation wave goes physical
- From a Paris stage: investor Patric (Foundamental) on why tech aimed at 2% of construction’s cost base was always going to disappoint
- The two questions that expose a weak tech vendor in five minutes
- A first look at our State of Construction Safety Tech report, landing next week: incidents consume 4 to 6% of project cost in an industry running 2 to 3% margins
