During an interview in his office in the New York Life Insurance building in midtown Manhattan, Tom Scarangello can’t stop talking. He’s not even speaking about Thornton Tomasetti (TT), the international structural engineering consultant of which he’s CEO, although the discussion very much relates to it.

When he was chairman of the New York Building Congress from 2014 to 2016, Scarangello put together a committee on innovation, which eventually became that trade group’s Council on Innovation & Best Practices. He recalls that after traveling around the country and the world observing construction sector activity, he’d come back to New York City “frustrated by the lack of innovation and best practices here.” Laments Scarangello: “Construction is dead last among all industries for innovation, even though innovation is all around us, it’s just not widely distributed.”

Scarangello仍然是理事会的联合主席，他对大型国会计划的在线门户网站感到兴奋，其中Tristate公司可以分享他们在其他地方工作的想法以及他们正在创造的事物，这些想法正在早期阶段。然后，他问他对理事会的热情和想法是否可以追溯到TT自己的创新。首席执行官微笑。

It’s clear from conversations with him and other company executives, clients and even a subcontractor that now is its co-developer of a new damping technology—as well as from reading past annual reports—that this is TT’s jam. The company is so dedicated to developing new tools and processes for the construction industry that it has developed a robust internal R&D unit and a spinoff company that brings AEC-focused technology to market—courting attention from venture capitalists, private equity and other investors and creating new revenue streams while spurring innovation.

That focus on moneymaking and growth also comes with a sense of industry altruism. The firm hosts many “hackathons,” at which technology developers from varying industries get together to create a usable app in just about a day, as well as symposiums that include other AEC companies. The Thornton Tomasetti Foundation continues to fund education and socially minded construction projects—more than $950,000 worth since 2008.

TT’s successful integration of multiple missions generated its selection as ENR New York’s Design Firm of the Year for 2018. The firm ranks No. 15 on this year’s Top Design Firms list, reporting regional design revenue of $90.77 million. Worldwide, TT had design revenue totaling $265 million. The firm also placed among the top 10 on many of the regional survey’s sector rankings: holding the No. 2 slot in both structural engineering and exterior facade design; No. 4 in regional green design, commercial and religious/cultural markets; and No. 5 in government/public service.

Innovation Payoff

甚至在桑顿·托马塞蒂（Thornton Tomasetti）获得当前名称之前，研发也是重中之重。自1960年代以来，联合创始人查尔斯·H·桑顿（Charles H.Zetlin在1970年将他的公司卖给了Gable Industries，因为它承诺将资助研发。七年后，两位工程师购买了它。

Aine Brazil, who stepped down as TT vice chairman at the end of 2017 and remains a board member, had been an engineer for just five years and newly arrived in the Big Apple during a recession in 1982. “No one was hiring,” she recalls in a phone conversation, “except for Lev Zetlin.” From her early days there, the firm proved its penchant for finding innovative ways to build structures. Brazil remembers that she and Scarangello both worked on “talls”—defined then as buildings of at least 30 stories—and that the firm was keen to optimize the use of lateral systems for such structures. Through the 1990s, she says, “we were just going gangbusters, getting things done” on numerous projects for a growing stable of clients.

9月11日恐怖袭击happened-generating a slowdown in New York City construction and a lull in work for TT employees. But that was a silver lining, Brazil says. “Post-9/11 was a slow period, but we didn’t waste it.… 3D modeling was just getting started. So we took the opportunity” to teach it to staff during the downtime. She says, understatedly: “We got slightly ahead of the curve with Tekla (structural design) modeling.”

But embracing new technology was not automatic in the industry, nor among all TT employees. Rob Otani, the firm’s newly appointed chief technology officer, says: “Most engineers do not want to do something different. ‘My work is good, why change?’”

但是，最终，客户在TT和行业其他地方推动创新。巴西说：“我发现客户更愿意接受新想法。”“如果可以节省他们的时间或节省他们的钱，他们绝对有兴趣。”

Pushing the Envelope

That seems to be the case with real estate developer Hines, whose relationship as a TT client began in 1994, when the companies worked on the former Swiss Bank Corp. building in Manhattan. They would also partner on other New York City financial sector structures to come, for clients such as Morgan Stanley and the Royal Bank of Scotland.

Hines纽约办事处的高级董事总经理汤米·克雷格（Tommy Craig）于2001年在新泽西州泽西城（N.J.他说：“那座建筑物上有巨大的大风。”该公司面对挑战，提供结构工程服务。

At the One Vanderbilt office tower now under construction near Grand Central Station, Craig says TT “in some way resolved all the forces in the building.” The firm’s construction engineering team used Tekla modeling to create shop drawings from building information modeling via TT’s proprietary software Konstru—which Otani calls “the Google Translate of BIM”—to interpret the BIM model as a Tekla model. The Hines executive sums up TT simply: “They’ve become absolutely fanatical about design innovation.”

That fanaticism was bolstered when TT acquired engineering and applied science firm Weidlinger Associates in 2016. “They had tremendous depth of innovation,” Brazil says. “That extra impetus helped us get over the big hump” in terms of TT introducing more new tech to the industry.

TT现在拥有各种生命科学知识产权（IP），其中包括公司后来对潜艇建模的心脏支架。Scarangello解释说：“心脏是一种压力容器，其液体贯穿其中，海底是一种压力容器。”

Nabbing Weidlinger IP进一步促进了Thornton Tomasetti的创新。2016年，两家公司的高管启动了私有公司TTWIIN。该公司的异常拼写的首字母缩写包含了公司的名称和“孵化器”一词，并开发了新技术并商业化。它的旗舰产品是Konstru，这是一个3D协作平台，可让用户共享来自不同设计和分析软件包的数据，该数据用于一个范德比尔特。

Otani负责TT的内部研发部门，Core Studio和Core Lab。该工作室很快创建了用于在TT内使用的计算工具，而实验室通过公司工作人员提出的项目和领导的项目开发新的方法，产品或功能。18luck官网奥塔尼说，每个团队中有大约12个当前的研发项目，其中3至四名成员。18luck官网他说，想法是在内部孵化的，并通过“更广泛的办公室”而选择了进一步的资金和发展。

The CTO says apps being developed are intended for automation, interoperability, structures, artificial intelligence and data visualization. Lack of expertise in the latter “is a weakness in our industry,” he says. TT made its Design Explorer, a data visualization application, available as open source technology. Otani says a software firm built a proprietary product that was based on Design Explorer. “In a way, it was a nice thing because it told us we were onto something,” he says.

Otani, who was on the team that designed the Tata Innovation Center for the new Cornell University campus on Roosevelt Island in Manhattan, has an engineer’s enthusiasm for minutiae and a C-suite executive’s savvy to proffer those details to a potential client not familiar with innovative tools and services TT can offer. He gushes about 3D printing everything from houses to bandshells to an artistic exhibit that includes steel framework and living plants.

The innovation push commands a lot of resources in terms of time, money and personnel. But Otani says that successful products can offer a 5-to-1 return on investment.

Staffers who were the brains behind them can become equity holders and receive bonuses, an approach that allows younger employees and future prospects to “make a contribution,” as Brazil puts it, to the industry and become more connected to the firm.

R&D can also foster new relationships with old allies. Engineer RWDI, which specializes in wind engineering and environmental assessment, is often a TT subcontractor. In the past year, they’ve worked on several major projects in New York City, Chicago, Bangkok and other global locations. The two became partners in 2017 on Hummingbird Kinetics, a tuned liquid damper that adapts NASA technology to minimize wind-induced sway in bridges and buildings. TT is “very keen to progress innovation in design,” says Mike Soligo, RWDI president and CEO. Hummingbird, a TTWiiN product, is starting implementation.

手指有很多馅饼，很难预测TT的下一步。巴西推测：“流程创新可以节省金钱并可以节省时间，也许是我们可能为未来做出贡献的地方。”

In May, the firm announced it had acquired England-based MFD, a security consulting firm with 26 staff members and $6 million in fiscal 2017 revenue. The merger will help TT boost security offerings—to protect against vehicle attacks and bombings as well as provide technology for thumbprint readers and retinal scans—in Europe and worldwide.

In 2009, the firm polled its employees, who now number more than 1,200 globally, about where they thought the company should be in 20 years. Scarangello says the answer he got back was “to be a global driver of change and innovation in our industry.”