For years, Barton Malow has invested in a structured approach to innovation — one built around discipline, measurable value, and the belief that good ideas deserve a real path to deployment. That framework is now entering a new phase, with a leadership structure designed to close the gap between innovation and execution.
Barton Malow’s new innovation strategy is now directly integrated with its K-12 Education market. With direct integration, the goal is to learn what works and what doesn’t faster, so what does work can be deployed more quickly throughout the rest of the organization to deliver the greatest value.
Why K-12 Education?
The K-12 education market may not always make headlines like stadiums or skyscrapers, but it is structurally one of the best environments for rapid innovation.
For starters, many K-12 projects share consistent program elements, such as classrooms, gyms, administrative spaces, and support areas, that are delivered repeatedly across districts. There are repeat clients, the same subcontractor base, and often the same tight-knit team from job to job. Teams stay together across multiple K-12 education building programs, sometimes running five, six, or seven projects for a single school district.
That repeatability is the big key. It allows the team to accelerate the innovation cycle — try, evaluate, and iterate — at a pace that stadium or one-off healthcare projects simply cannot match.
Barton Malow’s commitment to innovation is ultimately measured by the value it delivers to clients. That means compressing project schedules, reducing overall costs, and streamlining the experience for owner staff who are managing complex programs alongside their day jobs.
But perhaps most meaningfully, it means aligning priorities — structuring relationships so that the interests of the owner and the construction team aren’t in opposition, but bound together through shared risk and shared reward. When incentives are aligned, the entire project performs differently.
A Framework Built on Measurable Value
Barton Malow’s innovation process is not a suggestion box. It is a structured pipeline: a problem or idea is submitted, evaluated against the business’s value stream, tested, and either scaled or closed with clear reasoning.
The results are tangible. In the past year alone, the innovation and technology team tracked over 250,000 hours saved across the organization through deployed innovations. These aren’t just estimates, but documented time recaptured from work teams.
That maturity took time to develop. The shift from “innovation theater,” or chasing what looks impressive, to disciplined, value-driven deployment has been one of the defining achievements of the past year. Lean thinking has played a central role, grounding the process in a consistent question: Where does this fit in the value stream, and is it actually solving the right problem?
Reimagining, Not Just Optimizing
The new K-12 strategy is not focused on marginal gains. There’s a clear distinction between “optimizing” and “reimagining.”
Optimizing is making something a little bit better. Reimagining asks whether the thing needs to exist at all or whether it can be done entirely differently. While still seizing opportunities for day-to-day optimizations, Barton Malow is intentionally focusing on reimagining its processes.
Artificial intelligence is central to the strategy, but not as a starting point. Before any tool is introduced, Barton Malow’s project managers, superintendents, and project engineers define what good looks like: where the process breaks down, where time is lost, and where effort isn’t returning value. That clarity comes first. AI is then deployed in service of those conclusions — accelerating work that should move faster and surfacing honest questions about work that may no longer need to happen at all.
Barton Malow’s commitment to innovation is ultimately measured by the value it delivers to clients. That means compressing project schedules, reducing overall costs, and streamlining the experience for owner staff who are managing complex programs alongside their day jobs.
At Barton Malow, we approach AI through the lens of people, process, and technology — and we’re deliberate about that order. The three are inseparable: pursue any one without the others and you won’t get the impact you’re looking for. You can’t simply apply AI to a problem without first understanding the process behind it and meaningfully involving the people who own that process today. When those elements are connected and when the right people are part of the conversation, the process is clearly understood, and technology is introduced purposefully. That’s when the real ROI of AI implementation comes into focus.
But AI isn’t for everything. Barton Malow wins work because of relationships. Because customers trust its team members. Because clients have worked with the same project teams for years and do not want to work with anyone else. AI that displaces that relationship is not the goal. AI that frees up time to invest more deeply in that relationship is. What you do with the tool matters more than having it. Relationships, expertise, and human judgment aren’t replaced by AI. They’re what make AI work.
Scaling What Works
The 70/30 principle guides how the K–12 incubator will prioritize its work: at least 70% of innovations should be applicable across Barton Malow’s broader business, with no more than 30% specific to the K–12 market.
The incubator is not meant to be the only place innovation happens at Barton Malow. It is meant to accelerate the cycle so the company can deploy more, faster, and more widely.
About the Author: Lindsey Rem is Senior Vice President of Innovation + Project Delivery with 25 years of experience shaping how Barton Malow builds, delivers, and improves. With expertise spanning Virtual Design and Construction, technology strategy, and process innovation, Lindsey leads the company’s efforts to test, refine, and deploy the ideas and tools that keep Barton Malow at the forefront of modern construction.