Turner Construction — Why Problem Framing is the missing step in every corporate innovation program

Turner Construction had an innovation program that worked. Mostly.

Turner Construction runs one of the most structured internal innovation programs in the construction industry. The Innovation Challenge Program is a full-cycle process: an open ideation phase where employees across all levels and geographies submit ideas, followed by a development phase using structured workshops, followed by working groups that carry the most promising directions toward implementation.

Jennifer Downey, Director of Innovation at Turner, had been running and refining this program for years. The problem wasn't enthusiasm. The ideation phase generated hundreds of submissions per topic area, from entry-level employees a few years out of college to people with thirty years of experience on job sites. The culture was there. The process was there.

What was missing was a filter.

Ideas came in from every direction. They reflected individual experiences, local contexts, and different levels of specificity. Some were fully formed. Some were early-stage. Some were solving problems that weren't actually the most important problems for the business to focus on right now. And with hundreds of submissions per category, the innovation team faced the same challenge every innovation program faces when ideation goes well: too much input, not enough focus.

The question Jennifer's team was trying to answer wasn't how to generate more ideas. It was how to decide which ones were worth the organization's limited time, money, and attention to develop further.

What Does Problem Framing Do Inside an Innovation Program?

Problem Framing is a structured decision-making process that helps leadership teams identify and prioritize the specific challenges worth solving — before any solution work begins. It runs as a multi-session workshop with a small group of senior decision-makers, produces documented problem statements tied to real business gaps, and provides the framework that makes subsequent Design Sprint work more focused and more defensible.

Turner integrated Problem Framing between the ideation phase and the Design Sprint workshops — as a deliberate filter that converted a large, diverse pool of employee submissions into a focused set of prioritized opportunities that the organization could commit to solving with real resources.

DSA designed and facilitated the first Problem Framing sessions with Turner's team, then worked alongside Turner's internal facilitators as they took increasing ownership of running the process themselves.

What Was Happening Before Problem Framing Was Introduced?

Before Problem Framing entered the Innovation Challenge, Turner's Design Sprint workshops had a structural vulnerability: they started with a rough problem definition.

Jennifer described the difference directly. Without Problem Framing, teams went into Design Sprints with a broadly defined topic area and started generating solutions. The output was a wide variety of options — creative, energetic, and difficult to evaluate. There was no shared framework for deciding what counted as a good solution, because there was no shared definition of what problem they were actually solving. The output of the sprint reflected the breadth of the input.

This is a pattern that shows up in almost every well-run innovation program at scale: lots of genuine effort, strong participation, and outputs that are hard to convert into clear organizational decisions. Not because the people aren't capable. Because the broader the problem definition going in, the broader the solution space coming out — and the harder it is to evaluate what to do next.

Problem Framing was designed to close exactly that gap.

How Did Turner Run the Problem Framing Workshops?

DSA structured Turner's Problem Framing as a three-session workshop process, each session building directly on the previous one. Participants were six to eight people drawn from department head and project executive level — senior enough to have broad organizational knowledge, still close enough to day-to-day operations to understand what was actually breaking.

The executive sponsor model was a key structural choice Turner had already built into their innovation program. Each topic area had two executive sponsors from senior leadership — general managers and company officers — who weren't required to be technical experts in the topic, but who provided a critical connection back to leadership, facilitated access to resources, and kept the process anchored to the company's actual strategic priorities throughout.

Session 1 — Mapping the opportunity landscape

Participants worked from pre-built process maps prepared ahead of the session, so no workshop time was spent on mapping logistics. The group analyzed desired outcomes at each stage of the process, evaluated current performance against those outcomes, and identified gaps. Gaps, as Jennifer put it, often equate to opportunities. The session produced three key opportunity areas to carry forward.

Session 2 — Writing the problem statements

With the opportunity areas defined, the second session focused on articulating what the problem actually was inside each one. Not a vague theme — a specific, actionable problem statement that could be handed to a Design Sprint team as a brief. This is the hardest step in the process and the most frequently skipped in organizations that move straight from ideation to solutioning.

Session 3 — Evaluating the ideation submissions

The third session brought the problem statements back into contact with the hundreds of employee ideas submitted during the ideation phase. Participants reviewed submissions for alignment with the defined problem areas, looking for both direct matches and people who were demonstrating the kind of problem-solving thinking that would make them effective participants in the Design Sprint phase. The output wasn't just a shortlist of ideas. It was a curated group of people and directions that were coherent with each other and with where the organization needed to go.

What Changed When Problem Framing Was in the Process?

Jennifer described the shift clearly: the Design Sprints became focused. The solutions that came out of the sprint phase weren't a wide variety of loosely related options — they were responses to a specific, documented problem that a group of senior leaders had agreed was worth solving. That made evaluation straightforward. It made the path to implementation visible. And it changed the nature of the conversation at leadership level from "here are some interesting ideas" to "here is our recommended direction and here is the reasoning behind it."

The Problem Framing process also changed the ownership dynamic. Because the problem statement was built by a group of senior decision-makers — not handed down from above and not bubbled up from below — it carried the kind of organizational legitimacy that makes ideas survive the transition from workshop to real project. The idea was no longer one person's idea. It had been through a structured group process and emerged with endorsement from people who could allocate resources to it.

As Jennifer put it: it's not my idea anymore. It's our idea.

Why Do Ideas Stall Between Ideation and Implementation?

Turner's original innovation award program — the one that preceded the Innovation Challenge — illustrates the pattern precisely. Employees submitted ideas. The best ones won prizes. And then the ideas went nowhere, because there was no mechanism to take something from a concept to scaled implementation inside an organization of Turner's size and complexity.

The Innovation Challenge was built to fix that. But even with a structured development phase, the Design Sprints were only as focused as the problem definition they started with. Without Problem Framing, the development phase was doing real work on problems that hadn't been fully validated as the right problems to work on.

This is the structural gap most innovation programs don't see until they've run a few cycles. Ideation generates signal and noise in roughly equal measure. Without a structured step that separates them — one that involves the right level of leadership, uses a repeatable process, and produces documented outputs — the development phase inherits the noise along with the signal. The result is workshops that produce interesting outputs and working groups that struggle to get traction.

Problem Framing is the step that makes the development phase worth running.

What This Means for Innovation Program Design

Turner's experience points to several principles that apply across any organization running a structured innovation program.

Ideation and problem definition are not the same step. Employee ideas reflect individual experiences and local contexts. They are valuable inputs — but they are not problem statements. Converting raw submissions into focused, organizationally endorsed challenges requires a separate structured process with a different group of people.

The right participants for problem framing are not the same as the right participants for solution generation. Turner's Problem Framing sessions brought in department heads and project executives — people with both broad organizational knowledge and proximity to day-to-day operations. The Design Sprint sessions brought in the employees whose idea submissions had demonstrated strong problem-solving thinking. These are different contributions at different stages, and mixing them produces neither effectively.

Sponsorship at the right level is what makes decisions stick. Executive sponsors in Turner's model weren't there to evaluate ideas. They were there to connect the innovation process to the organization's actual priorities, facilitate resource access, and provide the institutional weight that turns a workshop output into an organizational commitment.

The goal is not to run more innovation cycles. It is to stop the wrong ones early. Turner learned this from their first Innovation Challenge, when they ran five topic areas simultaneously and ended up managing twelve to fifteen working groups at once. Jennifer's reflection: not every working group makes it to implementation, and that's correct behavior. A healthy innovation program stops ideas when the evidence says they're not the right focus right now. Problem Framing makes that call earlier, before significant resources are committed.