Building new digital services inside construction

When we started working with Volvo Construction Equipment, the question was bigger than designing another digital service.

They wanted to become better at creating new digital businesses.

That meant changing how opportunities were found, how quickly they could be tested and how decisions were made before large amounts of money were committed. It also meant building more product thinking inside an organisation with deep knowledge of machines, engineering and the construction industry.

One sentence from an early workshop captured the ambition well.

We need a foundation to create revenue from digital services.

That became a useful way to think about the assignment.

For roughly a year and a half, our team at Humblebee worked closely with Volvo Construction Equipment to establish an incubator for new digital products and services.

We were building products while teaching a new way of building them.

Construction has a productivity problem

Construction is an enormous industry, but productivity has moved slowly compared with sectors such as manufacturing.

That gap was visible in our own research.

Construction sites are complicated environments. A single project can involve contractors, equipment operators, suppliers, project managers and people with very different levels of technical experience. Information moves between all of them—and quite often it moves badly.

We looked at time lost searching for information, coordinating work, correcting mistakes and dealing with communication problems. Some existing tools were designed for several industries at once, with interfaces that did not fit the reality of someone standing on a construction site with gloves, noise, machinery and limited time.

Safety created another set of problems. Reporting could still involve paper or consumer messaging tools. Near misses were difficult to capture consistently. Useful information existed, but turning it into something that could help prevent the next incident was harder.

There was plenty of room for digital services.

The more difficult question was which opportunities were worth pursuing—and where Volvo could make a meaningful difference.

Treat the idea like a startup

Large companies are very good at running established businesses. A new digital product needs a different rhythm.

Early on, you know very little. You have assumptions about the customer and the problem. You have an idea of what people might pay for. Technology may look promising until you try it in the field.

We wanted the incubator to behave more like a startup.

Start small. Get close to the customer. Build enough to learn. Then decide whether the next investment makes sense.

The process moved through discovery, incubation and acceleration. Early concepts were tested for desirability, commercial viability and technical feasibility. If the evidence was strong enough, the team moved towards a minimum viable product, a business model and a plan for entering the market.

Investment decisions sat between the stages so weak ideas could stop before becoming expensive projects.

That part mattered.

Innovation inside a large organisation can easily become a pipeline where ideas continue moving because people have already invested time in them. We wanted evidence to have more weight than momentum.

Sometimes the right result from twelve weeks of work was a product worth building. Sometimes it was a clear reason to stop. Both saved the organisation time.

Working outside the machine

We described the setup as a hybrid corporate studio.

Volvo brought things a startup could spend years trying to build: industry knowledge, customer relationships, infrastructure, reputation and access to markets.

Humblebee brought another kind of environment. We could put product designers, business designers and technical people around an idea quickly, work through short feedback loops and challenge assumptions without carrying the same organisational history.

The combination was important.

The incubator had enough distance from the normal organisation to move quickly while staying close enough to use Volvo’s knowledge and eventually return successful initiatives to the business.

That handover was part of the design from the beginning. We were never trying to create a permanent innovation island. The goal was to build capability that could survive beyond the incubator.

Finding where Volvo could play

A lot of my work involved understanding the construction landscape.

Where was software already strong? Where were workers still relying on paper, spreadsheets or consumer apps? Which parts of the jobsite produced valuable data? Where could Volvo have a credible role beyond the machine itself?

We explored areas around site operations, communication, safety, quality and productivity. We looked at vertical software companies, construction startups and emerging business models. We studied where investment was flowing and where existing tools were failing users.

The aim was to find spaces where Volvo’s position in the industry created an advantage.

This led to a broader conversation about the future portfolio. Instead of generating unrelated service ideas, the incubator could work from agreed domains where Volvo wanted to build future capability and then search systematically for opportunities inside them.

It made the work much more focused.

Innovation stopped being ‘let’s think of something digital’.

We had somewhere to look.

Learning through real products

We could have spent a year designing the perfect innovation process. We chose to learn by doing.

Actual product ideas moved through the incubator while the operating model was still developing.

One workstream explored communication on construction sites. Another looked at safety and how field observations could become more useful information. Other research touched workflow efficiency, equipment, workforce and site optimisation.

The individual concepts mattered, but they also served another purpose. Each one tested the incubator itself.

How large should the first team be? When should technology become involved? What evidence was enough for another investment? When did an experiment need a product manager? Who owned the business after the incubator?

Those questions are difficult to answer from a framework on a wall.

A real product forces the answer.

The journey eventually covered the full path from discovery and market validation through MVP development, launch preparation and transfer into a permanent product organisation.

The organisation was part of the prototype

This became one of the most interesting parts of the work for me.

We began by prototyping services. We ended up prototyping parts of the organisation too.

A product-driven company needs clear ownership. Teams need permission to make decisions. Funding has to work differently when the outcome is uncertain. Someone has to decide when an experiment becomes a business.

The incubator work therefore moved into roles, governance and investment. We shaped responsibilities across discovery, incubation and acceleration, including ownership of opportunity assessment, portfolio direction, experiments and eventually the new business itself.

This organisational layer was as important as the interface of any product we designed.

You can build a good MVP in twelve weeks. If the organisation has nowhere for it to go afterwards, you have built a demo.

The value around the machine

Construction continues to change. Connected equipment produces growing amounts of data. AI is entering planning and risk management. Digital twins, robotics and automation are finding their way into more parts of the jobsite.

That creates an interesting position for companies such as Volvo Construction Equipment.

The future value around a machine does not end when the machine is sold. There are services around how it is used, how the site operates, how people stay safe and how work gets planned.

For me, that was the real purpose of the incubator.

We were helping Volvo learn how to find those opportunities and get them into the hands of customers quickly enough to discover whether they were real.

Building the ability to build

The visible output of an incubator is a collection of concepts, prototypes and early products. The deeper outcome is the organisation’s ability to repeat the work.

That was what we were building with Volvo Construction Equipment: a shared way to explore a market, frame an opportunity, test the riskiest assumptions, make an investment decision and give a successful product somewhere to go.

The work combined service design, product strategy, business design, research and organisational change. None of those disciplines could have created the capability alone.

The incubator became the bridge between an opportunity and a new digital business—and a way for Volvo to learn how to cross that bridge again.