When Bentley Systems launched the Going Digital Awards more than two decades ago, the goal was straightforward: Let independent juries around the world recognize the most accomplished digital infrastructure projects, from rail to energy to water. As the awards grew in prominence and attracted marquee projects—like the Elizabeth Line in London, a $1.7 billion wastewater treatment plant in California, and a huge high-voltage converter station in China—an unexpected pattern emerged. Some of the most ingenious and insightful breakthroughs, such as the unexpected use of engineering software or a clever idea to cut carbon emissions, came from smaller teams or even individuals.
Celebrating these engineers and their ideas is what gave rise to the Founders’ Honors, a recognition that Bentley’s founders and senior executives bestow every year on a small number of exemplary projects, individuals, and organizations. The judges say the honorees “particularly inspire us in our company’s mission of advancing the world’s infrastructure while sustaining both the global economy and environment.”
Greg Bentley, Executive Chair of Bentley Systems.Greg Bentley, executive chairman and former CEO of Bentley Systems, says the Founders’ Honors awards celebrate those who “not only discover something ‘digital’ that works, but are willing and motivated to go to the effort to nominate it and publicly share the innovation, rather than keep it to themselves for competitive advantage.” He adds that this instinct to “help propagate progress” by openly supporting peers is “rather appealingly unique” to engineers.
Bentley Systems announced the latest winners at its Year in Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards conference in Amsterdam. They include an innovative digital twin helping Ithaca, New York, cut carbon emissions, a new substation flood risk management, monitoring, and early warning system in China, and a digital twin of a critical pump station protecting New Orleans. Find the full list of the winners here.
Greg Bentley says the Founders’ Honors celebrates innovation that “is not usually a piece of software; it’s a way of using a piece of software on a certain type of problem that would not have been obvious.” He says his brothers were particularly impressed when someone used Bentley software in a new way, in part because it provided especially good feedback for the company. “Let’s encourage everyone else to do that.”
The idea for the Founders’ Honors came out of management awards that Bentley leadership gave to its software users. Those awards provided special recognition for applying Bentley software to a particular area, such as digital twins in water management. But in 2020, with the retirement of Barry Bentley after 40 years of building Bentley Systems into a global leader for infrastructure engineering software, they decided to reimagine and rename the award.
Along with the Bentley brothers, the Founders’ Honors jury includes Bentley CEO Nicholas Cumins and Chief Technology Officer Julien Moutte. The group doesn’t judge projects as a whole, but instead looks for outstanding examples of imagination, innovation, and inspiration. They usually meet in the fall, ahead of Bentley’s Year in Infrastructure and Going Digital Awards, to discuss and debate projects—many of which are referred to them by juries deciding the global Going Digital Awards. “Each of the juries has learned to highlight the right examples,” Greg Bentley says, noting that a typical year sees several hundred nominations for the Going Digital Awards.
Many of the projects involve resilience and sustainability. “We particularly like to tell those stories to set good examples,” Greg Bentley says. “It’s not that you have to entice engineers to be concerned about sustainability; they’re zealous about it in their own right. But you’re going to help them get credit for that and share best practices.”
This year, one winning project used software from Seequent, the Bentley subsurface company, to tap geothermal wells near volcanoes on the Caribbean Island of Dominica. Using geothermal heat to generate electricity, the project replaced 50% of diesel generators—along with the expensive, imported fuel—that islanders have used to power their homes and businesses.
Winners can also be honored for small but innovative aspects of large projects. Bentley software has been helping engineers at Mott MacDonald, SYSTRA, and STRABAG build Britain’s High Speed 2 (HS2), a high-speed railway designed to connect London with cities in the West Midlands. The HS2 is a marquee undertaking that already won two big Going Digital Awards, but this year, Greg Bentley and his fellow Founders’ Honors jurors were attracted to a hidden gem—an innovative use of Bentley’s Raceway and Cable Management software.
The software is typically used for routing electrical raceways and cables in large infrastructure and industrial projects, like power plants, data centers, and factories. But HS2 engineers used it to digitize, model, and lay out signaling cables that run along the tracks that lead to the Old Oak Common, which is a new railway superhub in the west of London that will bring together Victorian-era railroads and the new high-speed rail. Greg Bentley notes that the software isn’t a new product. “Somebody must have said, ‘This application would have high value if we got it right,’” he says. “Instead of being an afterthought, it will be institutionalized as something we can do well.”
“It also took on something which normally gets a shrug,” he adds. “Let’s encourage everyone else to do that. That is really the attitude that I want to commend.”
