b'AutonomyInnovation has been a pillar of the companys historyas natural for the Thiess brothers as hard workand has been passed on from one generation to the next.Just as with environment and safety, innovation remains an important focus forThiess as it moves forward.Innovation is the speed at which you convert a good idea into a commercial outcome, says former boss Martin Albrecht. There must be a point to doing something new and differently. Every project is a blank piece of paper and a journey to producing value. There is no end point when you think like that because there are always fresh waysto look at things.In decades gone by, innovations were often born of necessity, and usually reactive.We were bush mechanics and did what we needed to do to keep things going, said Thiess veteran of four decades Peter Hyvonen in the seventy-fifth anniversary book. Bill Wild, former head of Thiess Indonesia and a Leighton Holding executive, remembers when he joined Thiess from the Department of Transport and Main Roads, he invested in some high-tech equipment: two HP-45 calculators. Cec [Cecil Thiess] found out, and because they cost a couple of hundred dollars each, he hit the roofI was the ex-government Johnny splashing the cash. After quickly learning just how much the brothers knew about every detail of their business and how important every dollar was, he saw the other side, too: the brothers famous appetite for investing in technology and innovation went way beyond the scale of calculators. They introduced some of the first bulldozers in the country. They brought draglines into open-cut mines. They adopted new ideas from other parts of the world to be successful on the Snowy [Scheme]. They were always prepared to push the boundaries to find a competitive advantage.Robert Moore agrees that necessity can be the mother of invention, but so too can culture. I think our can-do attitude creates really fertile ground for innovation and improvement, he says. Finishing a job properly has always been a priority, and thats attractive to people with engineering and technical excellence. Lots of our progress comes from our asset teams, who work closely with manufacturers and know howmuch to push.94'