Suffolk Global Partnerships: Why America’s Contractor Is Learning From International Builders

Suffolk Global Partnerships is a Suffolk initiative that collaborates with cutting-edge international companies to solve shared built-world challenges — from cost engineering to optimal building design to supply chain management — and brings the best of those solutions back to U.S. soil.

When it comes to construction challenges in the United States, we can boil them down into three main issues:

• Buildings cost too much
• It takes too long to get projects started
• We’re facing a labor shortage

At first glance, most people wouldn’t think those issues extend to countries like Japan and Germany. Those nations have different economies, politics, cultures, histories; the list goes on. But believe it or not, the fundamental obstacles remain the same.

At Suffolk, curiosity and innovation are in our DNA, so we wanted to explore what we might be missing beyond our country’s borders. Enter Suffolk Global Partnerships. By connecting on themes that impact all of us, we can bring the best of what the world has to offer back to U.S. soil.

We’ve spent the last three years building relationships with international contractors, architects, and engineers to figure out where to start. For our first two trips, we partnered with Takenaka and Kajima, two leading Japanese contracting businesses making huge strides in new-age infrastructure, and Goldbeck, a German contractor that has created a productized — and highly innovative — approach to project delivery. Those visits and our subsequent conversations have opened our eyes to our common challenges and what solutions might transfer to the U.S. At the same time, we saw what components of their approaches work because of the landscapes of their specific countries. The U.S. is unique (and we’re proud of that, of course), so it’s true that not everything that works overseas will work here.

That’s really what the Global Partnerships initiative is about: sharing, learning, testing, failing, testing again, succeeding, and then doing it all over again. In the meantime, we’re working to create an open innovation ecosystem where we have lines open to other companies that are doing the same. I’ll share more here in subsequent articles about our time with Takenaka and Goldbeck, and we have more trips planned for 2026 and 2027 that will bring their own discoveries.

If you know of an international company that might have something to teach us, we’d love to hear about it. Because the built world is just that: the world. And there’s plenty out there to explore.