At our Raising your Game event this March 2018 at Silverstone, we interviewed some leading industry experts around their business challenges, objectives and how important it is for customers to remain relevant. John Stokoe CB CBE FIET is Head of Strategic Development at Dassault Systèmes for EuroNorth. John is a former Major General in the British Army, following his retirement, John followed a board-level career in the Construction, Infrastructure and Technology sectors.
With his experience as a Construction Strategy Adviser to the Board of the Lean Construction Institute of Australasia and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. John is well qualified to not only comment on the current challenges within the construction sector but also around encouraging young people to create a career in technology, engineering or manufacturing; a subject that he feels passionate about.
We asked John for advice on how companies can remain relevant, develop strategies to be sustainable, how digitalisation is being adopted in the construction industry and how companies such as Majenta Solutions and Dassault Systèmes can encourage our younger generation to seek a career in engineering.
Key quotes from John:
Strategic development:
“Strategic development means everything: it’s about business planning, strategy planning, it’s about helping people understand what strategy is about. How we’re going to deal with clients in a different way, helping them through the sales process.”
Being relevant in the future:
“Remaining relevant, I wouldn’t use though terms, I’d say ‘surviving’ and ‘being relevant in the future’, because relevance today is very different than relevance tomorrow.”
“We should all have a look around, see where the world is going, see where the economy is moving, see where thinking is taking us, and then formulate a strategy to be ahead of all of that.That way you don’t just remain relavant, you remain sustainable.”
STEM subjects and the younger generation:
“Getting young people to work in the manufacturing, engineering or scientic space is key to the future of our country.”
“Companes would be capitalising on the inate skills that they’ve already got, the way they think and use technology makes them an ideal fit for the future of our technology and engineering industries.”
“We should show them what the possibilities are and indeed where their imagination can take them.”
“What young people don’t see is the energy that goes behind the development, they don’t see the R&D that goes on, they don’t see the technology that is being used. If only they knew they have the skills to take that on themselves.”
Digital Technology in the Construction Industry:
“The construction industry needs to modernise, we are still building buildings how we did 100 years ago.”
“What construction companies need to do is to demonstrate the digitalisation of construction from the creation of intial architectual designs to the virtual models of the asset that they are going to build.”
“We need to show the whole PLM process can revolutionise they way the industry works.”
A big thank you to John for his time, and John’s presentation from the event will also be available on the blog very soon.