Turning R&D into practice

In 2002, a couple of years before he died, Charles J. Pankow, Founder and Chairman of design-build firm Charles Pankow Builders, established a research foundation in his name. A pioneer in concrete-forming and moment-framing technology, Pankow was frustrated with the U.S. construction industry’s paltry support of research—a tiny fraction of 1% of revenues, compared to 11.1% of revenue for R&D in the health sector and 4.0% in the automotive, according to PwC’s 2015 Global Innovation 1000 report.