The American Road & Transportation Builders Association (ARTBA) is bringing together some of the brightest minds in transportation development and business for a first-of-its-kind interactive learning event that will help transportation design and construction professionals increase productivity and profit for their employers.
ARTBA’s TransOvation Workshop & Exhibition, held Sept. 6-9 at the Lansdowne Conference Center near Dulles Airport in Virginia, will feature world-class innovators from 3M and NIKE, as well as world-renowned engineers and other industry leaders. The program is developed specifically for young industry executives and offers Professional Development Hours.
Among the speakers who will share the secrets of their “idea incubating” corporate cultures and how they have used innovative thinking to solve problems and change the way their companies do business:
• Ted Zoli, a heralded bridge engineer and a vice president at HNTB, is a 2009 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship recipient. Esquire magazine profiled Zoli in a 2010 cover story, “The Brightest: 16 Geniuses Who Give Us Hope.” Zoli also teaches at Princeton and Columbia.
• John Hillman, a senior associate with Teng & Associates, won the 2010 Engineering News-Record magazine “Award of Excellence” for his development of the Hybrid Composite Beam. ENR writes in its cover of Hillman, “[he has an] obsession that sets out to transform the infrastructure world for the better.”
• Darcy Winslow, NIKE’s sustainability innovator and executive-in-residence at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, has been called a “business rock star.” She will reveal how her team brought a sustainability revolution to NIKE with a series of real-world product design and engineering changes, affecting NIKE plants around the world—an investment that re-branded NIKE and its athletic wear for the 21st century, ensuring that the company’s reputation and practices matched the increasing public awareness of sustainability and “green” issues.
• Jerry Karel, 3M’s technical director, is a long-time practitioner and leader of R&D programs at Bell Laboratories and 3M. He has applied the principles of innovation across a wide range of industries including telecommunications, software, medical imaging, security and transportation. He is uniquely qualified to share the story behind 3M’s famous culture of innovation.
• Dr. Rachel K. Arulraj, an award-winning speaker, has spent her entire career bringing innovation to transportation design through new technologies. As an assistant vice president and principal professional associate for information technology at Parsons Brinckerhoff, Dr. Arulraj has been on the cutting-edge of Building Information Modeling and Virtual Design and Construction since their inception.
TransOvation will offer “bring back to the office” practical ideas. Participants will explore two new complex highway and bridge projects in the Washington, D.C., area — the Woodrow Wilson Bridge and Intercounty Connector — and learn how innovative thinking was brought to bear during the planning, design and construction phases to overcome challenges… build teamwork… gain public support… and add value while controlling costs.
Attendees will learn the nuances of protecting their firm’s intellectual property in an open procurement environment and how 3D and 4D technology will change the face of transportation design in the 21st century.
The workshop will also feature an “Innovation Showcase,” an exhibit area of game-changing products, technologies and services for the transportation design and construction professionals.
Registration, sponsorship and exhibition information is available at www.transovation.org.
