Each year, ELECTRI International makes Early Career Research Awards available to individuals in universities and research institutions. The findings of the research projects that are selected are eventually published, and the information that has been learned is disseminated to the entire electrical contracting industry.

The ELECTRI Program Review Committee reviews the submitted proposals and selects a small number of finalists who are then invited to present their proposals to the entire ELECTRI Council during its January meeting. The ELECTRI Council then selects the winners and provides the funding.

Each research project is monitored by a task force, which works closely with the researchers and provides advice and expertise. The researchers are required to provide regular written progress reports to the task force and ELECTRI International.

In July, ELECTRI International announced two Early Career Research Awards for 2016 funding.

One is "Best Practices for Early Adoption of Productivity Improvement Programs," proposed by Brian Lines, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Civil, Engineering and Architectural Engineering department at the University of Kansas.

According to Lines, electrical contractors can work to maintain their competitive advantage by using productivity improvement programs. Companies continuously modify traditional practices by adopting a wide range of information technologies and smart products. However, according to Lines, organizational behavior research has found that almost 70 percent of company-level productivity improvement programs fail to achieve their intended objectives.

"Adopting productivity programs is inconsistent across the electrical construction industry, raising a fundamental research question: Why are some companies able to implement productivity improvement programs, while other companies are less successful?" Lines said.

His study is designed to investigate company-level best practices for implementing productivity-improvement programs. Results will guide companies in ways to be Early Adopters—and thus better able to achieve successful, profitable outcomes, when implementing company-level productivity improvements.

"The electrical contracting industry needs a clear understanding of what creates barriers to implementation," he said.

His study will analyze barriers that are specific to electrical contracting companies and will investigate best practices for adopting productivity improvement programs. Results will demonstrate learnable approaches, skill sets, and leadership techniques that can be used to increase success rates and identify tactics that will be most effective against the leading barriers that contractors face.

The other research project is titled, "Flexible Overhead: Agile Strategies That Increase Electrical Contractor Profitability," proposed by Jake Smithwick, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Technology and Construction Management at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

According to Smithwick, as the construction market continues its recovery, the electrical contracting industry faces several critical decisions. For example, what is the best way to re-engage overhead expenses? Should companies outsource some of these expenses or keep them in-house?

"Electrical contractors' answers to these questions will have a significant and long-lasting effect on the industry," Smithwick said. "An optimal overhead structure requires a degree of organizational agility through early identification of opportunities and alignment of core competencies."

Smithwick's research is designed to collect specific information on overhead expense levels in the electrical construction industry and develop an easy-to-use assessment tool that will identify an electrical contractor's organizational agility. The assessment will identify companies' capabilities to implement advanced overhead management tools in terms of proactivity, reactivity and strategic vision.