| Operating in industries where demands are constantly shifting alongside social and technical evolution, PB’s longevity is a testament to the fact that its culture has always fostered growth and change. A significant aspect of that culture is our desire and capability to be innovative in the face of new challenges. With successful international expansion through the acquisitions of world class, established engineering consultancy businesses in Europe, Africa, Middle East, Australia and New Zealand, PB continues to push its own standards of excellence and open up new opportunities for collaboration and innovation.
PB’s Legacy of Innovation
In the past, PB’s innovation came as a natural result of its people and structure. Benson Bobrick, author of Parsons Brinckerhoff, The First 100 Years 1 , says that our founder William Barclay Parsons,
“…was profoundly aware the word ‘engineer’ meant originally ‘man of character’ or ‘man of genius.’ …[He] was one man who deliberately cultivated his life in the profession according to the ancient ideal.” (pp 3-4).
But more than just William Barclay Parsons, other members of the small firm of Parsons & Klapp, which eventually became Parsons Brinckerhoff, were geniuses in their own right. Eugene Klapp is credited with devising a new and celebrated version of the truss arch for the Hollow Way viaduct in New York. Walter J. Douglas designed the Sherman Island Powerhouse and Dam located on the Hudson River in New York, which still stands today despite the general opinion of the American Society of Civil Engineers that it could not be done. Soren Thorenson was knighted, along with Walter J. Douglas, by the King of Belgium for completion of the Scheldt Tunnel in Antwerp in under 18 months when all estimates claimed the work would take four years. And, of course, Henry Brinckerhoff holds a share of the patent for the third rail, one of the most important inventions in the last 150 years.
With PB’s international expansion, we have added similar traditions of innovation and have further enriched our history. In the late 1940s Professor C.H. Munro was appointed head of the Department of Civil Engineering and assisted in the planning of the University of New South Wales. His department was the first to offer formal graduate engineering courses in Australia and on his watch the department grew to be that country’s largest engineering school. A pioneer in water resources development and national planning, Professor Munro took a leading role in founding both the Water Research Foundation of Australia and, the Australian Water Resources Council. In addition to his widespread contribution to the growth and maturation of engineering in Australia, Professor Munro had a private firm that was eventually acquired by the growing Australian firm, Pak-Poy and Kneebone, which is known today as PB Australia.
In 1890, Sir Alexander Kennedy, a former Professor of Engineering at University College London, designed a railway electrification scheme for the City and South London Railways, one of the first in the world. He went on to assist in the design of the first underground conduit system for London’s tramways and to design the first waste heat generating station in the UK. A couple of decades later, Sir Alexander’s son, John Kennedy, recommended the formation and power transmission network to link the generating stations around the UK. Their firm, Kennedy & Donkin, along with another English firm, Merz & McLellan, collaborated to construct the National Grid in England. Separately the firms competed for jobs on the international stage until both joined forces with the PB family of companies in the 1990s.
Components of Innovation
The pace of innovation set in those early days was truly remarkable and is the foundation upon which our company’s prestigious reputation around the world resides. The key ingredients in innovation are technical excellence and collaboration. Innovation in one field or area can often be simply a recycled idea or concept from another discipline applied to a new problem set. Harvard Business Review editors have called this process of stimulating solutions from sources outside the immediate area of concern “cross-pollination.” Companies using explicit innovation strategies leverage technology to fac ilitate mandatory cross-discipline collaboration and exploration.
In earlier times, technological solutions to drive the innovation process were less important. At Parsons & Klapp, for example, with an office staff of 20 and each a master of his discipline, collaboration leading to innovation was almost inevitable. Parsons was an engineer with “no weak areas” and was a recognized leading expert on subways, railways, canals, water and power supplies. Brinckerhoff was a leading power traction engineer and electrical expert. Thomeson was a trained electrical and marine enginee r, a transportation specialist and an expert draftsman. Klapp was known as a bridge and railway expert, but was also an accomplished architect and a decorated U.S. Army major. Douglas was a mining engineer, bridge, highway, power supply and dam expert, and a superlative negotiator and businessman. It is remarkable to imagine all of this talent, technical expertise, and breadth musing over the same problems in one office at 60 Wall Street, New York, NY.
In 1892 Charles Merz was bicycling around Pandon Dene Power Station in England, charged with finding faults in the rubber cabling. While performing his duties, his mind was also operating in a parallel and much more innovative vein. Merz later wrote of his musings during those inspections, “At this time no attempt was made to supply electricity for anything but light, but I was always keenly interested in the idea of using it for power.” Merz and his partner, William McLellan, went on to found one of the world’s leading power engineering consultancies, Merz & McLellan.
In 1900 Britain was responsible for more than half the world’s tonnage in ship building, with half of that volume being produced in and around the city of Newcastle by the River Tyne. Supporting the shipbuilding boom were chemical works, forges, electric lighting, laboratories, railway trains, etc. Out of this bustling industry came a culture of engineering in Tyneside (also home to Merz & McLellan) that produced the steam turbine, high-speed generator and incandescent lamp. With the design and construction of Carville A, the largest all-turbine power plant in the world at the time, Merz & McLellan was credited with moving Tyneside into a new age economically and socially, and with writing the paper that became the classic template for power planning worldwide. For Merz & McLellan, the buzz of innovation was all around them. Finding ideas and methodologies from a variety of different sources and disciplines was as easy as finding a good lunchtime conversation in a local pub.
Today, the talent pool at PB is even richer. With access to thousands of skilled employees possessing expertise in a wide variety of disciplines and businesses, the potential for reaping benefits from cross-pollination is enormous. PB’s project-oriented business model presents a few challenges, however, to freer-flowing, cross-discipline collaboration. As the company has grown, staff specialized in a particular area or focused on particular projects has grown accordingly and has needed to move into different spaces. By 1957, for instance, PB’s New York-based bridge engineering group had grown to 30 employees, all occupying a single floor. Today, offices are sometimes arranged in similar clusters of focus. The opportunity for cross-discipline innovation has increased with the increase in specialty expertise, project experience and talent that growth has provided. But the ability to reach and connect with this diversity is challenged by geography, office arrangements and sheer size. Our talent base now is spread across nearly 250 offices in some 35 countries.
A clear example of the leverage our global reach and experience can provide is the recent efforts of PB on the Beijing Olympics. Although PB had staff experienced from involvement in the Atlanta Olympics, the Beijing plan faced a considerable challenge in its transportation needing to deliver 90,000 people per hour to and from the Olympic park, with more than 50 percent of these people being transported by buses. PB was able to bring in staff from its Sydney office who had designed a bus transportation scheme for the Sydney Olympics that successfully addressed similar volume concerns and won the contract.
With more frequent, more focused collaboration efforts across PB’s global enterprise, the possibilities for breakthrough innovation are powerful. In the words of Walter Douglas to the company upon his retirement from Parsons Brinckerhoff in 1940, “With your aggregate abilities nothing can stop you for a generation or more if you will pull together as the four original partners did.” His vision for the firm is as potent today as it was then. |
