Digital Construction Power Players 2025: part 2

Each year, Cemex Ventures reveals its list of the top 50 construction startups: this year’s list included Circuland, which is shortlisted with its partners at the Digital Construction Awards; while Nodes & Links, which featured on Cemex’s 2021 list, recently raised £9.5m in funding and has worked with Galliford Try Highways and BAM.

Cemex Ventures also runs a competition in which the startups get to pitch to executive representatives of Cemex and its partners, network with industry leaders, and, most importantly of all, get access to capital investment and real-scale pilots.

Currently in Cemex Ventures’ investment portfolio are the likes of 3D printing specialist Cobod and reality capture specialist DroneDeploy.

Emma Hooper is not only head of information management strategy at RLB Digital, but also vice-chair of buildingSmart UK & Ireland and a vice-chair of nima.

As this writer noted on LinkedIn earlier this year, Hooper is a fantastic communicator and has the ability to make the complex seem simple and eminently sensible. Whether it’s COBie, IFC, the Information Delivery Specification, or data, she can break the detail down into bite-sized chunks that are easily understood.

She’s a champion for change. Indeed, she was the first Digital Construction Champion of the Year three years ago.

Her outlook is surely informed by one of her earliest experiences of construction: namely working for Metz Architects as lead model author and joint information manager on the first project using the Integrated Project Insurance procurement model. With real collaboration at its heart, it must have been something of a shock to Hooper that the rest of construction wasn’t walking the talk. Thankfully, she does walk the talk.

Dr Anne Kemp OBE is a fellow and technical director at AtkinsRéalis, but that’s not the reason she is on the list. No, we’ve selected her because of her other two hats: namely chair of nima and convenor of the ISO 19650 standards suite.

She’s been at the helm of nima since the inception of its previous life as the UK BIM Alliance in the summer of 2016, and has been the 19650 convenor since that panel began in December 2015.

If you’re committed to information management best practice, you’ll be working with concepts and processes that were developed by teams and individuals ultimately overseen by Kemp.

Aside from her annual fundraising walks, Kemp is overseeing the roll-out of the Information Management Initiative (IMI). The latter – much like her walks – feels like a personal mission, not just a professional one.

At the nima autumn conference last year, she noted that the plan for the IMI is ambitious, but grounded in small steps. She said: “This is not, emphatically not, a talking shop. We have to be looking at practical outputs, and the big call is to simplify, simplify, simplify. We have heard that message, and we’ll be really striving to deliver on that.”

Smart assets represent the next frontier for information management to interface with. Smart assets, especially smart buildings, issue a new challenge for collaboration between developers, clients, tenants, contractors and FM teams. And the challenge is different if it’s a building being developed from scratch or an existing building being retrofitted.

To represent smart assets, we’ve selected Justin Kirby. He helped launch the Digital Buildings Council (DBC) last year and now acts as its executive officer.

The DBC aims to address market confusion through too many conflicting voices and vested interests, the technology promise gap, and how to demonstrate ROI and think holistically about how ROI is calculated, among other targets.

When RIBA launched the Smart Buildings Overlay for the Plan of Work last year, Kirby was swift to note that a new iteration would be needed quickly, as the overlay did not address the new versus retrofit issue. Fast forward to a fortnight’s time and he’ll be alongside the original authors at Digital Construction Week offering a sneak peak of v2.0 of the overlay.

By our reckoning, Nick Leach has been ‘doing BIM’ for more than 16 years, from Skanska to Multiplex and then to his home of the last eight years, Sir Robert McAlpine.

He’s been involved with nima and the Supply Chain Sustainability School since 2019 and is keen to share his learnings and best practice (he’s a regular speaker at Digital Construction Week and other events).

McAlpine seems to really ‘get’ digital construction and is regularly among the first to test new technologies. But that’s only part of the reason we’ve listed Leach: he’s also here to represent all digital construction leaders at all the tier one contractors.

McAlpine and the likes of Laing O’Rourke, Balfour Beatty, Skanska, Kier, Vinci, BAM, Mace and Costain have the power to set the standard, at the very least for their own supply chains, if not the entire industry.

They have the power to help innovations come to market.

Do they have enough power to influence clients? We’ll save that for another day.

Keep up to date with DC+: sign up for the midweek newsletter.