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40,000 Brains. One Innovation Filter. How AtkinsRéalis Picks Winners
Owen Drury
May 21, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 14 minutes
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INDUSTRY INSIGHTS
40,000 Brains. One Innovation Filter. How AtkinsRéalis Picks Winners
"It's very easy to come up with ideas, but it takes a lot more time to execute those ideas. And in a world of finite resources, you've really got to be selective," says Darren Martin, Chief Digital Officer at AtkinsRéalis. "Genius is 99% perspiration and only 1% innovation."
With 40,000 employees across the world, AtkinsRéalis could easily burn millions on promising technologies. Instead, they've built an innovation system that demands measurable returns and scales across a complex global organization.
In a recent interview, Darren shared insights into how one of the world's largest AEC firms evaluates, implements, and scales technology – offering valuable lessons for both industry leaders and the startups hoping to serve them.
🚨 TL;DR: What Big AEC Really Wants From Tech Startups
AtkinsRéalis CDO Darren Martin breaks down how a 40,000-person firm actually adopts tech
💸 Every initiative must hit a 4X ROI in 12–18 months
🧠 Innovation is crowdsourced, but rigorously filtered
⚠️ Startups must align with global priorities and show scalability
🛑 “Pilots” are dead — it’s Proof of Value or nothing
The AtkinsRéalis Innovation Approach: Structured for Success
When Darren joined AtkinsRéalis, he discovered a familiar problem: enthusiastic but disconnected innovation happening throughout the organization. While this sparked creativity, it created challenges:
"When I first joined, we were 38,000 brilliant minds all contributing to what we could do at a digital level. And it was quite hard to filter out some of the noise and focus on the priorities that were going to change the dial for the company," Darren explains.
His solution was developing a digital operating model that balances centralized strategy with regional execution. This includes:
1. Ideas Hub: A platform where any employee can submit innovation ideas, but focused on specific challenges rather than random concepts.
"We've introduced an Ideas Hub where any one of our 40,000 people can create an idea and put that in. But what we're really interested in is putting out particular challenges – industry challenges, market challenges, specific client challenges – and then crowdsourcing a response from our people."
2. Voting and Regional Validation: Ideas gain momentum through employee votes, but must also align with business priorities represented by regional digital leads.
3. "Proof of Value and Accuracy": Rather than running open-ended pilots, each innovation initiative must demonstrate both value and accuracy within defined timeframes.
4. The 4X Rule: Technologies must demonstrate potential for 4X return on investment within 12-18 months.
This disciplined approach helps AtkinsRéalis concentrate resources on fewer, higher-impact innovations. But it also creates a high bar for new technologies to clear – something startups seeking to work with enterprise AEC firms should understand.
Selling to Giants: Advice for AEC Tech Startups
Darren offers candid advice for construction tech startups hoping to break into large AEC firms like AtkinsRéalis:
1. Target Strategic Leaders, Not Just Projects
Startups should move beyond selling at the project level to achieve scale, aiming to align with global priorities and decision-makers:
"I see a lot of people focused at some transactional level inside a region into a client... [but] trying to get the alignment right at a global strategic level is probably the best use of their time."
2. Understand the Funding Reality Check
Darren wants to know where startups are in their funding journey and their exit strategy. This isn't just curiosity – it affects the risk calculation:
"If I spend a lot of time with a startup that is eventually going to be acquired by a company, if they're acquired by a company that we're already heavily partnered with and is part of our ecosystem, then that's great... But at the same time, if we invest a lot of time and money in a company that's then acquired by a construction tech leader that we're not heavily exposed with, that we don't work with, then that technology goes."
3. The Scale/Stability Tradeoff
While startups offer innovation and focus, Darren weighs this against scalability and stability:
"We're definitely interested in disruption... But the transition from that particular small team of a few people to potentially a different technology that we think can be scalable may be part of that evolution... it doesn't feel like the right balance between innovation and agility with the outcomes that we're responsible for as a major employer of people all over the world."
4. Align with Strategic Priorities
AtkinsRéalis has defined focus areas like "virtual site access" that span multiple regions. Startups should understand how their technology fits these global priorities:
"For example, I mentioned virtual site access, that's really important for us globally. So technologies around that, there are probably 20 to 30 technologies that we could call off that are part of that suite... But getting close to the three top technologies that we want to work with and then we'll mandate that as part of our tech stack and then roll that out in a consistent way, being in that cohort and investing shoe leather in that cohort, yes, you need to take a case study that says you deployed it here, but that might be in a region that we are less focused on or with a client base that's not one of our top 60."
Enterprise Scalability: The Electric Bike Test
One of Darren's most insightful frameworks is his "electric bike" test for evaluating a technology's potential to scale:
"If you think about a paper round… typically by the time the morning's done, someone can only do one paper round. Our job is to bring an electric bike into that paradigm and disrupt it. And the question is, how many more paper rounds can be done with this electric bike?"
The challenge isn't just finding technology that works – it's finding technology that will work across diverse teams and geographies:
"Some people are going to be looking at the bike and think, this is fantastic, I can do five paper rounds, I'm going to sign up to five paper rounds. Other people are going to say, I don't believe this bike will work, I've never ridden a bike, I don't know how to ride the bike, I don't believe in electric bikes, I'm only going to say, I'm only going to deliver one paper round."
This framework helps explain why promising technologies often fail to scale in enterprise environments. The theoretical 5X improvement might be possible, but organizational realities mean the actual improvement might be lower. Successful innovation leaders account for this implementation gap.
The Future of AEC Technology
When asked about future technology opportunities, Darren highlighted two areas:
1. Hyper-Personalized, Modular Construction
"The opportunity for hyper personalization and hyper modularization of the retail construction experience is a real high opportunity," he explains. "There's something about meeting the construction needs, the housing needs of the planet in a lower cost, more modular way and enabling that to be done at the design level so it can be hyper-customized, so it can feel like a high-value product."
2. Integration Between Design and Construction
"What we've noticed is that relationship between the design packages and how they get executed by a construction prime contractor and the subcontractors – that's where a lot of the friction and cost and delay can exist."
Lessons from the AtkinsRéalis Playbook
For AEC leaders looking to strengthen their own innovation approach, several key lessons emerge:
1. Connect Innovation to Business Metrics
AtkinsRéalis focuses on technologies that directly impact core business metrics:
Increased win rates
Reduced losses
Improved project schedules
Better client outcomes
Increased profitability
"We've zeroed in on quite a significant opportunity around winning work and how we put proposals together," he notes.
2. Balance Central Strategy with Regional Execution
The company maintains global consistency while respecting regional priorities through digital leads who report to both regional presidents and Darren.
3. Measure What Matters
By setting clear ROI expectations and tracking outcomes, they've built a track record that justifies further investment:
"We're starting to build a solid track record of demonstrable results. And part of that was applying a discipline around proof of value and accuracy."
In an industry facing both talent shortages and intense pressure to digitize, this focused approach delivers what matters most: measurable business results from technology investments. As Darren puts it: "It's just kind of getting the idea and then converting that to value is really where the effort is. So we've got to be selective."
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