green housing t h e
r i g h t
w a y
pole project // i see concrete // cemex BORBOLLA + CASULLO + DE VREE+ GARCIA+ HOSFORD + SLOTS
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POLE REPORT B O R B O L L A + C A S U L LO + DE VREE+ GARCIA+ H O S F O R D + S LOT S
green housing t h e
r i g h t
w a y
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p.6
INDEX
executive summary
p.8
background research
p.12
design
n requirements
p.14 design development
p.24
conclusion APPENDIXES FROM P. 20 ON.
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executive summary
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he concrete industry has seen the introduction of a wide variety of innovative concretes. However, the construction industry is very conservative and slow to adopt new building materials. We believe that CEMEX must invest in innovative technologies beyond building materials in order to maintain market leadership. New energy requirements, urban gardening concepts, and ecological responsibilities challenge the traditional palette of CEMEX’s products.It is important to allow potential customers to experience the qualities of this versatile material. Therefore, new visualization concepts can be used to show investors and potential users that concrete has great advantages in relation to glass/steel or wood and offers additional options for construction. Companies often have a difficult time leveraging the positive qualities of their brand into new product extensions. Our primary research has shown that engineers, project managers, and designers do not view concrete manufacturers as consultative resources. This perceptual gap between CEMEX’s primary businesses and its consultative services is problematic. For this reason, we are proposing a product that can help bridge that gap. We propose a new, premolded, building material that can be used for the construction of small to medium height structures with a focus on sustainability and conspicuous conservation. The new building blocks will provide the same building experience as traditional premolded blocks but with an ecological focus. The intent is to further CEMEX’s focus on innovative products and services (i.e. building and sustainability consulting) as a way to create a competitive advantage that will be difficult for competitors to reproduce. We are focusing on individuals and small to medium size customers because we believe they will be more accepting of new building methods vs. those in charge of large construction projects. This will help CEMEX develop a track record of innovative success that can help persuade large customers of the value CEMEX’s innovative services can bring to their projects.
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background research
he direction of our initial research began during kickoff week. We identified five areas of interest that we believed would be essential in understanding the problems facing CEMEX and its industry. These include: sustainability , education of future decision makers , education of current decision makers , brand identity and communication , and how to effectively engage employees in problem solving, innovation, and general buy in to company strategy .
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Our research indicated that CEMEX is active in sustainable efforts and that our proposal would need to integrate sustainability as a feature, but that we probably wouldn’t be able to offer additional guidance to CEMEX on a general basis. We conducted a substantial review of academic literature regarding organizational behavior and the management of knowledge intensive organizations. It was determined that without greater insight into company specific incentive programs, hiring and promotion policies, formal and informal network structure, idea generation, idea communication, strategy formulation, and downstream strategy communication, a customized employee engagement plan was outside the scope of our resources. However, we are providing a list (Appendix A) of the academic material we reviewed in hopes that CEMEX may find articles and ideas specific to CEMEX’s needs worth pursuing. While conducting our research we identified three major categories of problems CEMEX and its industry face: microeconomics , communication , and an unpredictable future . These problem areas would become the basis for our design requirements.
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Microeconomics
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icroeconomics dictates that standard concrete producers are price takers and survival rests on a company’s ability to reduce operating costs beyond that of its competition. This also leaves commodity companies vulnerable to demand shifts and anticompetitive dumping practices by its competitors. It is clear that CEMEX wishes to increase the diversity of its concrete and cement products away from its competitors, however this is a temporary solution as new concretes face commoditization as well. This led us to believe that CEMEX must expand into knowledge and service based products in order to develop a sustainable competitive advantage. CEMEX is in agreement, but the path is unclear. We investigated the routes which CEMEX can take to successfully move into a new brand category.
consumer psychology literature indicates that brand extensions are most likely to inherit the qualities associated with the parent brand if strong links exist between the parent and the extension, thus making people more accepting of the extension. CEMEX is interested in providing sustainability and other building consultancy products. However, there is a large conceptual gap between concrete manufacturing and sustainable building consulting.
We believe CEMEX can overcome this gap with a product that links the category in which CEMEX is an exemplar (concrete manufacturing) to its consultative ambitions. Therefore, we believe our solution needs to provide a conceptual link between CEMEX’s core business, and their consultancy service line. The consumer psychology literature also CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY AND suggests that category-exemplar BRAND EXTENSIONS associations are bidirectional. This means that, once established, CEMEX is an exemplar of the features of a strong CEMEX branded concrete product category in many consultancy business may influence parts of the world. It is this status that the perceptions of the CEMEX we believe CEMEX can leverage in core business providing additional creating brand extensions beyond incentive to bridge the conceptual this category. A brief review of the gap with a new product.
Communication
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e investigated interorganizational communication issues, but decided this was outside the scope of this project and so have provided general research references that CEMEX may find useful but have not addressed this problem specifically. Instead, we focused on the B2B and B2C communication problem. CEMEX has developed innovative
concretes that solve many design and engineering problems but have had difficulty gaining buy in from a conservative construction industry. We believe our solution must strengthen the communication channel between CEMEX and its customers. This benefits both CEMEX and its customers and provides an additional step toward establishing CEMEX as a leading consultancy business.
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THE FUTURE
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he future is notoriously difficult to predict. We live in a world where technological advances can disrupt long held beliefs about the status quo and change industries over night. We view concrete as a stable building material, in that it is unlikely to be replaced by a disruptive technology any time soon. However, we must be cognizant of the changing requirements of the structures concrete will be used to build in the future. We tried to imagine how population and economic trends may change the design of
cities and infrastructure. A continuation of the In any case, we believe CEMEX should continue its urbanization of cities means we will likely continue push toward knowledge based products in order to build upward rather than outward. to maintain its flexibility in the face of an uncertain future. We also believe that our solution should However, disruptive technologies such as self embrace the challenges posed by an increasing driving cars and telecommuting via virtual and world population and continued urbanization. augmented reality will likely have an impact on the These challenges include affordable housing way city transportation infrastructure is designed. for a growing population both in developed It may even lead to a reversal in urban population and developing nations, access to fresh food, densities if jobs no longer require work to be done and increased pollution and greenhouse gas at the downtown office every day. emissions.
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Design Requirements
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hese requirements were derived from our initial research into the business problems CEMEX faces. We believe the most sustainable solution to CEMEX’s “commodity trap” problem is to extend its brand into knowledge and service based products.
Our first requirement is that our solution must help bridge the conceptual gap between the core and consultancy business units. The solution must also provide a communication link between CEMEX and its customers. This requirement will solve two problems, it will increase CEMEX’s ability to learn about the challenges its customers face (a key requirement for any consultancy) and will provide a learning channel to help increase the awareness of its value added products. Sustainability was a major concern for individuals we interviewed and is likely to increase in salience when considering product purchases. Therefore, sustainability must be a conspicuous feature of our solution. As noted earlier, we know CEMEX is committed to sustainable efforts, but the general public may be far less aware. If executed properly, the bidirectionality of attributes associated with our solution as a category exemplar will allow CEMEX’s core business to benefit from a perception of sustainability as well. Finally, our solution must be adaptable to the changing requirements consumers will demand in the future. These changes will likely be due to technological disruptions in peripheral industries, rather than a direct effect on concrete itself. However, the changes may have a profound impact on the structures concrete is used to build. Our solution should take current economic and consumer trends into consideration in order to be commercially viable.
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Design Develop ment
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isted above is our brainstorm process after Review I. It will focus on how we chose 4 ideas to present in Review II and how we selected our single solution from the 3 we listed based on what we believed would best suit the design requirements listed above.
In Review I we presented the research we had completed in order to understand the problem areas we wanted to address. At this point we thought our solution may come in the form of a strategic business plan for CEMEX that addressed each of the original areas of interest, sustainability, educating current and future decision makers, brand identity and communication, and employee engagement. However, we reassessed the feasibility of developing such a plan and realized that given our level of access and timeline, we could not produce a project plan to address each problem area with enough specificity to be of value.
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e decided that we should look at new product categories into which CEMEX could expand. In order to generate a wide solution set, our first brainstorming iteration relaxed all design constraints. After a large set was generated we began trimming ideas by asking if we believed the ideas would solve some or all of our identified problems given our design constraints. We
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narrowed the field from approximately 40 concepts down to 4 ideas that we felt were feasible based on current research or technologies, and would address our design criteria. We presented the 4 ideas in Review II: •3D printed housing with integrated smart technology and modular interior and exterior design. •Building structures with smog eating concrete. •Greenhousing - vertical gardening through specially designed concrete “bricks.” • Combining photovoltaic concrete with wireless charging to provide electric cars with constant free energy.
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e used the feedback from Review II to help direct our efforts toward a single idea that we would develop and present at the Final Review. After learning more about the current use of smog eating concrete we decided that this idea wasn’t novel enough and was removed from the consideration set. From the remaining three ideas, we wanted to pick the idea that would best address different
stakeholders as well as each CEMEX specific problem category within the design criteria so we built a matrix and listed the ways each product would accomplish these goals (Appendix B). After reviewing everyone’s input we ranked each idea from 1-3 (3 being the one we thought would best address each problem and was the most feasible). The Green House idea ranked highest and was selected as our solution.
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Conclusion
his project has challenged us personally and professionally. We had a lot of ideas and energy coming out of kickoff week but the ambiguity of a definite solution made it difficult to pick only a few ideas. The initial research before review 1 was very helpful in providing a design framework for the selection of newly brainstormed ideas after review 1. This framework helped guide our idea generation and selection in a structured way that also reduced the pain felt in eliminating ideas. We also developed great team cohesion even when we differed in opinion because of this early framework.
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important for an agile project like this. Increasing the number of reviews may have been helpful as well because we could present ideas without spending too much time researching and elaborating on them until we had a definite direction.
This project has been a great learning experience for all of us. We have worked hard to develop group norms and processes that kept us moving forward. For many of us this has been our first experience working with others over multiple time zones, languages, and disciplines in a mostly virtual environment. We will look back at the POLE project as a great foundation for our future enIt might have been good to have the first review deavors. Please see Appendix C for our individual earlier so that we would have more time to adjust reflections. before review 2. The number of iterations is very
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Ap pendix A
Employee Engagement Reference Material
Building a Successful Culture •Chatman, J. A., & Cha, S. E. (Summer 2003). Leading by Leveraging Culture. California Management Review, 45(4). •Hargadon, A., & Sutton, R. I. (2000, May-June). Building an Innovation Factory. Harvard Business Review. •O'Reilly, C. (1989, Summer). Corporations, Culture, and Commitment: Motivation and Social Control in Organizations. California Management Review. •Pfeffer, J. (2005). Producing Sustainable Competitive Advantage Through the Effective Management of People. Academy of Management Executive, 19(4).
Formal and Informal Networks •Hanson, J. R., & Krackhardt, D. (1993, July-August). Informal Networks: The Company. Harvard Business Review. •Hunter, M., & Ibarra, H. (2007, January). How Leaders Create and Use Networks. Harvard Business Review.
Incentives and Goals •Kerr, S. (1995). On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B. Academy of Management Executive, 9(1). •Locke, E. A. (2004). Linking Goals to Monetary Incentives. Academy of Management Executive,18(4). •Shaw, K. N. (2004). Changing the Goal-setting Process at Microsoft. Academy of Management Executive, 18(4), 139-142.
Creating Psychological Safety •Kim, C. W., & Mauborgne, R. (2003, January). Fair Process Managing in the Knowledge Economy. Harvard Business Review. •Rousseau, D. M. (2004). Psychological Contracts in the Workplace: Understanding the Ties That Motivate. Academy of Management Executive, 18(1).
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Ap pendix B Decision Matrix
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Ap pendix C
individual ReflLections F on POLE
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Juana Borbolla
POLE has been learning in all way: work-wise, cultural- wise, life-wise. A whole experience in such different ways. It’s been up and down. We’ve had big challenges but also such good times. As a whole I think it has been a life lesson. I’ve not just learnt how important is to get to know people you’re working with as much as you can, but also that cultural differences make a huge impact in the result you get and the rythm you work in.
were never sure how they wanted stuff. However that sort of makes you be more sure of what you choose. I was lucky my team was formed by great people that got along pretty well, I can say that these people are also my friends now. Which makes it also really special. I am really thankful and proud of being part of this project.
Even if at some points we were all confused and not really sure of what we were doing I think we were comitted to the fact that we wanted to deliver something as good as we could and that fitted the emotional part for the project. The most important part of this is not just to think about what With a bigger panorama I can say that the big your client is sayin but what is hidden behind it part of the work could be done in distance but and the commitment with people who is going to detailing gets super difficult, because the iteration use it. I think we tend to forget that we are working and feedback gets really slow so distance short of for someone else instea of ourselves. makes it sloppy. Biggest challenge in this I would say it was the expectations they have from us, we Other great learning was communication in all levels. Talking, writing, skyping, scopiaing, whatever suits you better I think the most important part of it is saying what you really thing, otherwise work wont get better.
As a young designer I’ve always worked in team for several exams and projects I did at the university and in some workshops. But in my opinion, the POLE experience was different: not only a project. It was a path, always amusing and sometimes hard, that allowed me to grow not only as a professional but also as a person. Curiosity is the main reason for most of my choices during my life and, especially in this occasion, it rewarded me. I did not know nothing about CEMEX’ brief and also, I did not know my teammates, nor in which way we would have to work. One world: challenge! So, we started together to build something unknown.
so that after the first review we had to think about new ideas again, in less time! And we did it, even if through several doubts. Consequently, for the second review, we proposed some concepts that were not so well defined but interesting enough to develop something strongly good.
Miriam Casullo
Finally we focused on one of those concepts and started to work on it: we divided things to do for each person of the team and then we confronted everything through our scopia-meetings, going on, straight to our final goal. During these months we have had various moods, sometimes optimistic and sometimes without hope. But here we are, in the end, with something concrete to present for CEMEX, for our POLE’s mentors and particularly for all of us students. Yes, because first of all POLE is a personal challenge and you have to confront yourself with international people and work with them in distance: not so easy!
In the initial phase, started in Guadalajara, we put the bases for a preliminary concept that we have maintained through the first months of work, in which we made a lot of brainstorming, researches, Maybe I would have been able to do more for my team because it is composed by extraordinary and various ideas to solve our questions. people, always ready to give a hand. And perhaps Unfortunately that previous thought was not this is the soul of POLE: share the knowledge and concrete enough to satisfy CEMEX’ current needs, help each other to reach the same goals together.
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Marin de Vree
The POLE project was both a personal and a professional challenge for me. It has taught me a lot about myself and the way I function within a group project. The project assignment itself was another big challenge. As we arrived in Guadalajara, we did not know a lot about CEMEX, nor the assignment that we’d be given. We had to find our own route and work our way through endless options and reasoning.
ended up at the second review, where we couldn’t really deliver the concepts that we wanted. That posed a challenge, since the second review was the last review before the finale. Luckily, as time passed by and the stress grew bigger and bigger, stuff started to happen again. In the last few days of the project, a ton of work was done. I believe that this project assignment has been very challenging to all the team members. It was very complex and sometimes vague what the expectations were. We managed to distill a few values that were key to us, but had to drop a lot of them as well. That’s what they call “Kill your darlings”. It was hard killing our darlings, because we see enormous potential in all the ideas and concepts we posed.
The start of our process in México was wonderfully sparkling and full of ideas. We left the campus with a big load of inspiration and stuff to think about. The hard part was condensing this into relevant information. After this was done, we had to implement our information into a logical structure, which was easier said than done. At this point, we realised that we had so much interesting information, but so little idea about how we were The team collaboration has seen both good and going to implement it, that the sparkle died off, bad days. We all had exams, holidays, personal matters and other distractions coming through. and we felt lost. This makes for a sometimes not so consistent Right after the first review, we had to reconsider all working environment, where we could not be the things we did previously. That took some time, entirely sure on whom we could count. and we had trouble getting on track again. I felt like we should have met in person again, just to But when we had meetings with the six of us, it felt restate our personal connections. After a lot more almost as if we were back in México, as familiar as research and wandering through the woods, we it was.
The POLE experience has been very challenging. We had a lot of energy coming out of the kickoff week but I think the ambiguity of the solution has been difficult to adapt to. The project management course I took last spring focused on agile projects which this definitely fits. My expectation was that we would have more client contact, but I can understand how that is difficult in a project like this with this many teams and students. However, it makes it challenging to iterate when the feedback is few and far between. For this reason, I think an earlier first review would have been helpful.
set of criteria that our solution needed to meet. It would have been much more difficult to identify good candidate solutions without a strong set of design criteria.
Andrew Hosford
I also learned how important it is to make a case for your ideas if you believe in them. However, no one has been upset that their idea wasn’t chosen because we spent a lot of time debating each idea and exploring the pros and cons. This gave all of us a good sense of procedural justice because we knew each of our voices were heard and considered. That has also helped keep everyone My team has been very upbeat throughout the motivated toward the final goal. semester which has helped us avoid getting stuck when we weren’t sure what direction to head. We I have worked with a diverse group of people while spent a lot of time at the beginning of each iteration in the military and as an engineer, but this is the brainstorming new ideas. It was good to have a lot most internationally/skillset diverse team I have of ideas because our process of elimination did a worked with on a single project. I think this taught good job of narrowing the field and we may have me a lot about working remotely on individual been pigeon holed into just one or two ideas if parts, while still understanding the work everyone we didn’t have such a large field to start with. It else is doing and how it all fits together. That is a was also good that we spent a lot of time trying to difficult thing to accomplish even when everyone identify the root causes of the problems CEMEX works in the same building. was having. This early analysis provided a good
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Mick Slots
Team Battista ft. Jacek. The most multicultural team I have worked with. It starts in Mexico in a week with a lot of adventures and fun. We had a great week and I couldn’t stop talking about it when I was home. There were some doubts in Guadalajara, because we didn’t had a specific planning for the next weeks. We thought that the best way was just go into the research and let’s see what it brings us. They weren’t convinced about that idea, but we thought that we can do it if we are motivated and trust in eachother. We find out that the mission to accomplish this project was really hard. Everyone’s always saying: “Think out of the box”. But in this case there wasn’t even a box, because of the width of the challenge. And if I look to the concept after the whole process where we were going through, I am proud of my team. You can see that every
person have made some progress (personally and professionally). In normal life (if we were all living in a small country like the Netherlands) we shouldn’t maybe even “chill” with each other. But now after all the hard work we are a team that respect each other and having fun when we are together. That was the key to the solution that CEMEX needs. Teamworks and a great environment in one team. The POLE project was a great opportunity to connect with people around the world and work with them in a special way. Weekly we had a meeting and in fact we spoke each other for 1 day, 9 hours and 50 minutes (I counted). That was the time we discussed and finally there was the green house. Also personally it was a challenge to improve my English skills. Maybe not everybody can see/hear it, but there was definitely improvement
The POLE experience was very challenging in many ways. In the beginning before the kickoff week the project was unclear and ambiguous. The kickoff week was helpful to truly understand the project and how we could address it. During the weeks before the first review we were having a hard time to decide which path we should follow. My team was a good one, and the dynamics we had to work were very efficient. During each virtual meeting, we had we has some discussion of what everybody researched and together we decided which idea had more potential. I liked that when though someone’s idea wasn’t chosen they wouldn’t get upset because that helped a lot to keep the team dynamic smooth and efficient. After the first review, we had a rough time because our first ideas weren’t as good as we thought so we had to re-iterate and find a new solution. From this point, it was a more difficult to work as a team because all of us had different projects we were involved as well and school was also demanding time from us. With teamwork, we addressed this issues and got a solution for the second review. Even after the second review we had to re-iterate to come out with the final solution, which made me realize that this type of project is demanding and isn’t as easy as it seems to solve. What I found more challenging of this POLE experience was working along with people from other countries, where working cultures are different and geographic location made it difficult to meet and work along. But even though it was a challenge it was a very rich experience from which I learned a lot. After all, big companies have the same issues, so this type of projects help me get prepared for the professional world.
mARCO GARCIA
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