I N N O VAT I O N
Dr. Aminah Robinson Fayek
Leveraging the strength of its ties
to the construction industry and
the breadth of the construction-related
disciplines that are covered
under its umbrella, in May 2019 the
Faculty of Engineering at the University
of Alberta established the Construction
Innovation Centre (CIC) – a forum for
collaboration between academia and
industry in the construction sector. The
CIC intends to become the place where
academia, industry and government
come together to create high-impact
innovations across the construction
engineering spectrum and pioneer
solutions to the most pressing problems
facing the industry at large. The CIC
benefits from the combined experience
and expertise of faculty members
who are established researchers and
educators with the University of
Alberta, as well as the university’s
trusted industry partners.
“The CIC is the culmination of 25
years of university-industry collab-oration
in Alberta,” said Dr. Simaan
AbouRizk, the chair of the Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering
at the University of Alberta. “It takes
many of the successes we have achieved
with select companies, brings them
under one umbrella and extends them
to the entire industry. A centralized
and integrated model for our research-ers
and industry partners will play a
major role in making our industry
more competitive.”
The CIC intends to take its place as
the foremost source for cutting-edge
research and technology for Alberta’s
construction industry, and it is setting its
sights on expanding its influence, first
throughout Canada and eventually to
the rest of the world.
“Through the CIC we want to effect
positive change for the construction
industry,” said Dr. Aminah Robinson
Fayek, director of the CIC. “In order to
do so, we need to search for solutions
at the intersections of disciplines, as real
breakthroughs require an interdisciplin-ary
approach and the ability to com-municate,
collaborate and build rela-tionships
between organizations and
researchers of a variety of backgrounds.
The CIC embodies this spirit by creating
a culture of university-industry collabo-ration
where each party views the other
as part of the fabric of doing business.”
The CIC is an idea whose time has
come, providing a solution to the issue
of curating spaces where the open and
meaningful exchange of ideas, results
and information between industry rep-resentatives
and research groups can be
facilitated and carried out.
“In my opinion, one of the consistent
challenges we’ve experienced when it
comes to effective collaboration is the
construction industry’s overall reluc-tance
to standardize data and share
it,” said Jim Kanerva, co-chair of the
CIC’s Scientific Advisory Committee.
“There are pockets of sharing, but not
enough. Academia has been ready for
this for a long time, able to navigate
the space ethically, safely. I believe
our competitive fears in the industry
have held us back. In our region and
at this time, less investment, fewer
projects and more foreign competition
may provide the right environment
to achieve more effective collabora-tion.
If this is true, the CIC’s timing
for launching and overall approach is
great. We’ve collected a multi-industry/
multi-academic-research-group team
under one banner, aligned with similar
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