Innovation inside Australia’s biggest engineering firms rarely looks like a startup. It’s driven by engineers who spot problems on live projects and push ideas through layers of risk, approval and culture – reshaping how infrastructure is designed and delivered from the inside out.
The League of Intrapreneurs sounds like something from a Marvel comic, but this global membership group is all about supporting people with an entrepreneurial spirit – who drive change within large organisations, rather than turning innovation into a new business. And engineering firms are full of them.
Take Civil Infrastructure Group (CIG) Director Andrew Rovers MIEAust. As more Victorian rail viaduct projects began shifting to precast concrete construction a few years back, he realised the company’s bread-and-butter work building reinforced and post-tensioned concrete structures on site could start to disappear.
“Up until the last few years, all the bridges we worked on would have three spans, and now they all seem to have more than a dozen,” said Rovers, a civil engineer with two decades of construction behind him.
Precast solutions can cut the build time for supporting beams from three weeks to around eight days, reducing disruption and speeding project delivery times.
And while installing precast beams and crossheads was more logistically challenging than in-situ builds, requiring huge 400 t cranes and complex route arrangements, customers were won over by the significant time savings.
“We realised that we were going to keep losing jobs to precast unless we worked out how to deliver our in-situ work much faster.”
His team developed a patented heat-curing system that slashes concrete curing times from days to hours, allowing entire pier columns and crossheads to be poured in a single operation.
The CIGcure technology, which Rovers and his colleagues developed with over 15 months of testing, has since helped the company win nearly every rail viaduct contract in Victoria.
By completely rethinking the fundamentals of their approach, Rovers and the team at CIG cut a three-week process back to days.
This is intrapreneurship in action. While entrepreneurs launch startups to commercialise their ideas, intrapreneurs drive innovation from within existing organisations, navigating complex approval processes, risk-averse cultures and commercial pressures to transform the way infrastructure gets delivered.
Sustaining agility
As engineering firms scale, they face the innovator’s dilemma: failing, not through incompetence, but by doing what shareholders demand – prioritising revenue streams over uncertain ventures.
Although most large engineering firms were founded on innovation, as organisations scale, entrepreneurial agility becomes harder to sustain.
Sue Brown, Executive Group Director for Sustainability at Worley, points out that large engineering firms are full of people with brilliant ideas and solutions; the challenge is to channel them. “Bringing discipline and rigour and prioritisation to those ideas is actually difficult,” she said.
The problem extends beyond shareholder pressure to an industry-wide culture. Engineers build their reputations on delivering reliability, and can struggle with the inherent uncertainty of innovation.
“One thing I find that can challenge engineers is that expectation to provide a definite outcome,” said Emma Jones, Executive Advisor for Innovation and Transformation at GHD. “With innovation, we start with a problem and the solution is unknown at the beginning of the process.”
Large engineering organisations face particular barriers to innovation. Complex approval processes, risk management requirements, procurement conservatism and delivery pressures create resistance even when everyone agrees innovation is needed.
Rovers encountered this when he first proposed testing his rapid-curing system on a live project. The technical innovation itself posed challenges. Unlike precast curing, which uses steam applied to thin concrete elements, Rovers’ approach required heating massive pier structures while simultaneously cooling their cores to prevent thermal damage.
“You can’t just heat concrete up non-stop so it goes hard quickly, because you’ll actually damage the internal structure long-term,” he said. “You have to be able to heat it and then cool it down so no part of the concrete is more than 20 degrees different from any other part.”
Proving compliance before live deployment required extensive testing. The team invested 15 months in development, conducting trials that replicated real-world conditions as closely as possible. Even then, to convince stakeholders – clients, the Department of Transport and VicRoads – the team had to show compliance with tests they hadn’t anticipated.
“We did as many tests as we could come up with – then they had a couple that we hadn’t thought of. We actually met all the requirements of all, every test we did.”
READ: The rapid-curing system slashing rail construction times from weeks to days
Real problems
Successful engineering innovation often emerges not from corporate innovation labs, but from practitioners solving real problems on live projects.
John Hilton, Design Director at Aurecon, spent almost 50 years in bridge design before bringing his A-Bridge concept to life. The idea first took root 30 years ago when his father pointed out deteriorating timber bridges during a country drive and said, “You ought to do something about it”.
Existing replacement options for timber bridges can be expensive and time-consuming, requiring cast-in-situ concrete decks with long curing demands, closing roads for extended periods.
Hilton assembled a deliberately diverse team at Aurecon to develop the A-Bridge, drawing on geotechnical engineers, road designers, flood modellers, environmental specialists, surveyors and digital modellers alongside senior bridge experts to develop an alternative using fully precast, modular components.
“When you’re innovating, you need a diversity of views,” he said. “You don’t want people who will think like you. Some of the best ideas come from new graduates, because they haven’t gone down the same path I’ve gone down.”
The team explored a range of ideas before coming up with their solution. The A-Bridge eliminates bridge bearings and deck joints, requires minimal on-site concrete work and reduces construction time from weeks to days. With an estimated 1500 timber bridges in place across NSW alone, the solution could save many millions of taxpayer dollars.
Hilton said the strong innovation culture at Aurecon was instrumental in getting the A-bridge over the line.
“We are not encouraging innovation for the sake of it. If you can show real benefit, the company will step in and be right behind you.”
At GHD, innovation teams operate as what Jones describes as a “pit crew for innovators”, helping staff develop and test ideas while maintaining connection to live project delivery.
The company has seed funding for pilots, while a global technical conference brings together about 100 different technical leaders several times a year for cross-pollination across more than 45 disciplines.
Success factors
Across different organisations and innovation types, common success factors emerge. Executive sponsorship is essential – but insufficient on its own. Every firm we spoke to said innovation must connect to genuine delivery problems, rather than abstract opportunities.
At Worley, a grassroots process shaped the company’s strategic direction. Following a major acquisition, CEO Chris Ashton ran 80-100 workshops globally with about 20 participants each to define the new organisation’s purpose.
Brown said the process meant priorities emerged from across the body of the organisation. “There was really deep engagement and consultation.”
This organic mandate gave Brown a “strong North Star” for developing sustainability as a core capability and prompted the establishment of a thought leadership partnership with Princeton University focusing on scalable solutions for the energy transition.
The importance of customer co-creation recurs across organisations. Worley developed carbon accounting platform EmissionsView with a major LNG player willing to share operational data and experiment together.
Brown noted that executive buy-in typically hinges on whether there’s “a customer willing to go shoulder to shoulder with you and support the development of something”.
Worley’s venture board brings further discipline to innovation, tracking ideas from seed funding through to market. The company prefers rapid conversion from idea to value, Brown said. “We’d rather go hard and fail fast.”
At Aurecon, Hilton says the company helped address client risk concerns through a licensing model for A-Bridge. All relevant design documentation was handed to Transport for NSW, ensuring continuity even if Aurecon no longer existed.
“The state government always needs to manage that element of risk,” Hilton said. “The licensing model makes sure that a product which is ultimately beneficial to the state is fully available to them.”
Perhaps the most under-estimated success factor is persistence. GHD uses a “double diamond” framework, showing how innovators repeatedly hit walls of resistance, with each collision being an opportunity to refine their approach.
“You don’t really know how many goes that will take,” Jones said. “People really underestimate how challenging that is, from developing a minimum viable solution versus when it actually will scale.”
Rovers and his business partner faced scepticism from colleagues and external consultants who thought their heat-curing idea would never work. “We didn’t have support at all, at first. But we persevered.”
The breakthrough came when test results demonstrated the system worked. “Once we had the information that it was actually working, heating and cooling, everyone started getting on board.”
READ: 4 things executives really want to hear from engineers
The path forward
Intrapreneurs in engineering organisations operate at the intersection of technical expertise and organisational navigation. Their innovations often emerge from intimate knowledge of project challenges that external disruptors lack.
For engineers wanting to drive change, Brown suggests leveraging existing processes within their organisation. “For people who are intrapreneurially minded, find those sponsors and champions within your organisations and work through the processes to get your ideas out there.”
Hilton encourages engineers not to be restricted by conventional thinking. “Don’t just be confined by what’s in the textbook,” he tells his university students. “Think about how we can do things better, more efficiently, safer, more sustainably. If you keep doing the same thing, you get the same result.”
Jones says that collaborative frameworks can help facilitate intrapreneurs in organisations. “Intrapreneurs do need that support group, people who can do that translation. Having that team around them helps them to feel comfortable, and helps bring in those diverse perspectives.”
The construction and engineering sectors face intensifying pressure to deliver more infrastructure faster while reducing environmental impact.
Intrapreneurs who can navigate organisational complexity to bring innovations from concept to deployment will be essential to meeting that challenge.
Why most innovation units fail – and some don’t
Corporate innovation programs often struggle to deliver results. Protected spaces that were meant to nurture new ideas become isolated from commercial reality, generating concepts that never translate to client value.
Jones has spent more than a decade working to avoid that fate. She describes her GHD team as a “pit crew for innovators” rather than innovators themselves.
“A lot of what we do is helping others to spark ideas, develop those ideas, test them and validate them, and bring them to some form of maturity,” she said.
The difference between programs that succeed and those that merely generate ideas lies in connection to real delivery challenges – and practical risk management.
GHD bases its approach on the ISO 56002 standard for innovation management, bringing systematic rigour that brings a level of ease to an organisation dominated by scientists and engineers.
“It’s measured. There’s evidence, there’s financial and investment rigour around the steps. There’s also some appropriate flexibility, along with room for experimentation and, importantly, failure too; but it’s calculated to be safe to fail.”
Innovation at GHD isn’t treated as a value-add that can be cut during downturns, Jones said. Instead, it focuses on doing more with less, finding ways to deliver greater value using fewer resources.
“A lot of people associate the word innovation with, ‘Oh, let’s do more. Let’s do some crazy stuff.’ It’s when there are constraints that we need innovation the most, and it forces you to be so much more creative.”
This article was originally published in the May 2026 edition of create with the headline “Inside the intrapreneur’s playbook”.
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