Almost every construction technology pilot in the country is paid for by a company large enough to absorb the loss if the tool doesn’t work. The findings then stay inside that company.
The Coalition for Smart Construction, based at Virginia Tech and co-founded with Falls Church-based HITT Contracting, is trying to break that pattern. It’s building a curated members-only online forum, described by its interim managing director as Reddit-like, where member builders discuss construction technology and then collectively fund the research the membership actually wants done.
Who currently decides what the industry tests
Andrew McCoy, the coalition’s interim managing director, framed the problem to Construction Dive as an industry unaccustomed to research and development, where only firms able to spend $100,000 to $300,000 on technology get to shape what gets built. That figure is his characterization of the affordability gap rather than a surveyed number, but the structure it describes is familiar to anyone who has watched a contech product get designed around one national contractor’s workflow and then land badly everywhere else.
The coalition has deployed $280,000 in grants across five pilot projects with HITT so far, allocated per project. The range is wide: prefabricated energy cell solutions for data centers at one end, studies of how data centers demonstrate community benefit at the other.
The distribution problem the forum is meant to solve
A shared forum sounds soft next to a grant program, and it’s probably the more important half. Small and mid-size contractors don’t usually lack access to technology vendors. They lack a way to find out whether a tool worked for a firm shaped like theirs before they commit to it, because the firms with the answer either don’t publish or publish through a vendor’s case study.
The coalition also has a partnership with Associated Builders and Contractors to bring smaller members in, and its physical Smart Construction Lab in West Falls Church, Virginia is under construction.
The dates worth watching
McCoy’s projected timeline runs pilot testing with ABC members around October 2026, a deployment-ready system by February 2027, and market availability in March or April 2027. Those are his projections, not commitments, and a members-funded research pool has an obvious failure mode: whoever pays the most tends to set the agenda anyway.
Still, the October date is concrete and it’s soon. Contractors who have wanted a vote on which tools get studied have a specific window to get involved, and the alternative is the arrangement that already exists. Firms too small to run their own pilots keep buying tools validated on somebody else’s jobsite.
Craft training has been through a version of this unbundling already, as with NCCER’s CraftPro program for contractors too small to run their own training.
Source: Construction Dive’s Q&A with Andrew McCoy. Coalition details at Virginia Tech.