Home building is in good company when it comes to being slow and reluctant to adapt, evolve, act on signals that spell out obvious need for change in how things get done.

A Harvard Business Review piece this week focuses on barriers to innovation, noting here that two out of five business leaders in a recent survey cited that their organizations didn’t have trouble detecting signs of risk and a need to change, but rather, had real problems acting on those signs.

HBR contributor Scott Kirsner, editor of Innovation Leader, writes:

When your “forward scouts” see something important, what mechanisms exist to set up collaborations with outside vendors or startups, or run a quick pilot test with a function or business unit? Too many companies wait for the annual strategic off-site to roll around before they address the changing dynamics of their market.

Greg Renner, vp of marketing at MiTek USA–with whom we spent two days in the blistering Las Vegas heat as the KB Home ProjeKt, BUILDER’s Concept Home for 2019, got underway with vertical construction, puts it slightly differently.

“The only time people change is when the pain of not changing becomes greater than the pain of changing,” says Renner. “It must be about that time in home building.”

Renner, whose MiTek team developed collaborative 3D modeling software, automated materials handling, and its fastener and truss connector plates used in installing the structured wall panel system for ProjeKt that Entekra produced in its Northern California factory, regards the downstream on-site assembly process as a real-time r&d discovery center.

“Seeing how the local framing crew works with and adapts to an entirely new panelization process is an important moment for me to learn,” says Renner. “These crews have never seen fully completed floor panel cassettes like these before.”

So, KB ProjeKt is literally an example HBR commentator Kirsner refers to above as a mechanism “to set up collaborations with outside vendors or startups, or run a quick pilot test with a function or business unit,” and the “business unit” in this case is the KB Home Las Vegas division, led by Brian Kunec and his team, which is on pace to build and deliver more than 1,200 new homes in the Las Vegas Valley this year.

Brian’s role of adding judgment in the KB Home ProjeKt design and development process–pushing for innovation, while at the same time, ensuring that the ultimate home lives in harmony within its Inspirada community surroundings. Too, he served as the final and deciding vote on what could be built and how.

Kunec’s go-to team on the ground for the vertical structure assembly–working with an Entekra S.W.A.T. team of framing supervisors–includes superintendent Joe Kandt, who bolted out of an early career in banking four decades ago, and has established cred as one of the best supers in the Las Vegas Valley. His role on ProjeKt build, equal parts traffic manager, part diplomat, quality assurance, and risk anticipation expert blended leadership with some of his own elbow grease in the mix.

“This new process is not so much a technical challenge as it is getting the team to buy in and work together, park their egos outside the site, and get the outcome we’re looking for,” says Kandt. “It’s fascinating to be part of this. Hopefully, it’s the first of many homes we build this way.”

Kamdt’s sidekick and “Radar” character on-site, and a force of nature herself is plans manager Michelle Merrick, who somehow seems to be everywhere at once. Whether it’s getting crew members where they need to be for the next structural component as it makes its descent by crane into the site, or seeing to their safety as 108-degree temperatures start to wear on their energy levels late in the workday, Merrick is the epitome of the human scale needed even as building and job site technologies advance.

One of KB Home’s “forward scouts,” who has lived in the front lines of driving collaborative innovation efforts across KB’s ecosystem of manufacturer, energy and water utility, and trade partners is Jacob Atalla, vp for sustainability at KB. For Jacob, piloting a new way of building a new kind of home that brings an entirely new array of values and benefits to home buyers, KB Home ProjeKt is a “dream assignment,” although it’s a full-time job on top of another full-time job. During the ProjeKt enclosure assembly process, Jacob acts as both observer and participant, studying details such as how machine-cut offsets and seatings allow structural members to fit more snuggly and more quickly in place, adding to a tighter, more durable, and more resilient building envelope.

Jacob Atalla’s take-aways from four days in the desert at Inspirada will make for an entirely new knowledge base to apply to projects, procurement workflows, and opportunity areas for collaborative approaches to solving both job site workflow and home performance challenges.

The stream of connection between three flatbed trucks stacked with ProjeKt’s structured panel system and the site itself was a carefully mapped, sequenced, and timed process. No one on the job site reflected the constant-motion precision of that process like Patrick “Paddy” McErlain, site services manager for Entekra. Paddy, who’s personally supervised the job-site framing of more than 6,000 structures in the United Kingdom and, now in the U.S., has the muscle-memory for every facet of integrated off-site to on-site assembly workflows, and had a big hand in helping local Vegas framing crews quickly travel their learning curve in the new process.

Heroes on the KB Home ProjeKt team are legion, many of them unsung, many of them working as far off as Monaghan, Ireland, where Entekra’s building engineers digitally built the entire enclosure in 3-D models down to the nail before the CNC machines cut their first structural member. Heroes include the likes of Joanie Frazier, driver of one of the three flatbed trucks the 7-hour, 500-mile journey from Entekra’s factory in Northern California to the Vegas site. Joanie, a grandmother of three, worked a full couple of days to ensure her rig’s payload was offloaded safely, without damage to property or person.

The human level is where barriers to innovation are either made more formidable or bridged. KB Home’s team–whether it’s on the job site in Inspirada or in any of scores of offices, factories, and rigs in this big messy ecosystem that is construction–is full of people bent on hurdling those barriers.