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Industrialized construction (IC) is promoted to address some of the ills associated with the processes and products of the traditional construction approach. With several successful projects, IC is progressively becoming a preferred alternative construction approach and spurred the interest of contractors, developers and housing authorities in the technology. Increasingly, these stakeholders are keen to ascertain the compatibility and feasibility of using IC in their projects. This paper aims to develop a knowledge-based decision support framework for implementing industrialized construction projects (ICPs) that can facilitate better and informed decision-making when deciding to implement ICPs.

A comprehensive literature review was implemented to recruit 40 decision support factors (DSFs) and grouped into project requirements, location and site attribute, labour considerations and organizational factors. A 3-member expert panel validated the relevance of 35 DSFs, which became candidates for a structured questionnaire survey of experts in 18 countries. Statistical techniques are used to evaluate and prioritize the DSFs, leading to the development of a conceptual framework.

Statistical analysis revealed 33 significant DSFs. The top five most significant factors that could influence the decision to implement IC in a project include a stringent requirement for project quality control, suitability of the design for IC, organizational readiness and competencies in ICPs, client receptivity to IC and the need to minimize field construction time. A framework of project requirements, location and site attributes, labour considerations and organizational factors was proposed as decision support.

The proposed framework may help to inform decision-making regarding the implementation of IC in a project. It has wider applicability because it includes technical, managerial and operational aspects of and the required competencies for IC, which are shared between project types and territories. The prioritized DSFs could be used as a guide when implementing IC, especially in countries where bespoke decision support systems cannot be developed.

The paper delineated the most important DSFs that are shared between IC project types and territories and can be used to investigate the compatibility of using IC in a proposed project. This research constitutes the first exclusive attempt at delineating, quantifying and ranking the sets of decision-making factors, drawing on international data set and contributes to the empirical checklist of DSFs for ICPs.

Industrialized construction (IC) leverages manufacturing principles and innovative processes to improve the performance of construction projects. Though IC is gaining popularity in the global construction industry, studies that establish the best practices for implementing IC projects are scarce. This study aims to benchmark practical lifecycle-based best practices for implementing IC projects.

The study used a qualitative research design where nine IC cases from Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong were analysed to identify best practices. The methodological framework of the study followed well-established case study research cycle and guidelines, including planning, data collection, data analysis and reflection on findings.

The study identified and allocated key considerations, relevant stakeholders, best practices, typical deliverables and best indicators to the different construction lifecycle phases of IC projects. It also developed a lifecycle-based framework of the best practices for IC projects.

The study provides practitioners with practical insight into how best to effectively implement, manage and evaluate the performance of the IC project lifecycle phases. The proposed framework can serve as a practical diagnostic tool that enables project partners to evaluate the performance upfront progressively and objectively in each project lifecycle phase, which may inform timely corrective actions.

The study’s novelty lies in developing a framework that identifies and demonstrates the dynamic linkages among different sets of best practices, typical outputs and best practice indicators across the IC project lifecycle phases.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an ethnographic analysis of the infrastructure intervention process in rural, non-industrialized countries, providing justification for a new approach to technical design. The new approach, Contextual Engineering, merges engineering with sociology to identify place-based conditions that may influence adoption of technological interventions.

A survey of international engineering practitioners, combined with the author's personal journals from 18 international project experiences are qualitatively analyzed using nVivo software to develop a stronger understanding of what motivates stakeholders to undertake humanitarian engineering work, how they incorporate place-based conditions and how their decision-making affects intervention outcomes.

Critical findings include the need for practitioner self-reflection to recognize motivations and beliefs; recognition that industrialized-world technology may not function effectively if it doesn’t acknowledge the client’s societal standards; identification of local context to determine practices, knowledge and beliefs that reside uniquely within the client community; resistance to application of practitioner standards that may not correspond with client conditions, understandings and needs; analysis of power dynamics within the client community, between client and neighboring communities, and among project stakeholders; and incorporation of innovative self-sufficiency in technical infrastructure design.

This paper follows upon previous published research by the author regarding the origin and application of her new approach to rural international infrastructure design, Contextual Engineering, and uses ethnographic qualitative analysis to identify key conditions that justify the Contextual Engineering discipline to more effectively serve rural clients from alternately developed societies.

This paper aims to contribute to the ethical debate over roles and responsibilities to address the injustices of climate change and its impacts. The current impasse over taking action may lie in the very different ways people view the world and their place in it. The aim is to explore some profound contradictions within differing strands of knowledge feeding into common understandings of climate justice.

A literature review of appropriate peer-reviewed and “grey” literature was conducted with a view to defining the term “climate justice”.

In addition to there being no single, clear definition of climate justice, a fundamental schism was found between what indigenous peoples want to see happen and what industrialised nations can do with respect to both the mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change.

One limitation to defining climate justice, and reason for publishing, is the lack of peer-reviewed work on this topic.

This paper has many practical implications, the most fundamental of which is the need to reach a consensus over rights to the Earth’s resources. If humanity, within which there are many societies, chooses to follow a truly equitable path post 2015, industrialised countries and corporations will need to move away from “endless growth economics”. The ways in which climate justice might be operationalised in future are considered, including the concept of a “climate-justice” checklist.

While the reconciliation proposed in this paper might be considered idealistic, unless it is acknowledged the Earth’s resources are limited, over-exploited and for all people to use sustainably, thus requiring a reduction in consumption by individuals relatively affluent in global terms, climate negotiators will continue talking about the same issues without achieving meaningful change.

Previous IMP research has shown that innovation benefits tend to gravitate across organisational, company and legal borders. However, OECD and EU policy assume that innovation investments will create benefits in close spatial relation to where these were made. The overall purpose of this paper is to consider how opportunities and obstacles of innovation appear from the perspective of: a national policy actor, its regional mediators and a policy supported and research-based firm engaged in innovation. A specific interest is directed to what interactive aspects that are considered by these actors; in the using, producing and developing settings.

Influenced by the research question and theoretical point of departure the authors investigate what type of interfaces our focal actors recognise in the using, producing and developing settings. A total of 41 face-to-face and phone interviews focusing on each actor’s approach were conducted; 23 interviews in order to investigate the “policy side” of innovation attempts, while 18 interviews have been performed in order to understand a single business actor’s innovation approach.

The study shows that both the national policy agency and the regional policy mediators primarily operate within a developing setting, and furthermore, applies a rather peculiar interpretation of proximity. As long as the developing setting of the innovation journey is in focus, with the task to transfer academic knowledge advances to commercial actors, the proximity aspect is rather easy to fulfil. However, as soon as the producing and using settings of the innovation is taken into consideration, the innovation, if it survives, will gravitate to a producing setting where it can contribute to investments in place.

The study investigates the opportunities and obstacles of innovation; the spatial aspects included, and how these are considered by: a national policy agency, a regional mediator and a policy-supported innovating firm, in order to juxtapose the policy doctrine with the experience of the business actors such policy wishes to support.

Contemporary innovation policy investments rests on the assumption that the main problematic interface is the one between the non-business developing setting and a rather friction-free producer and user setting. Given a business landscape characterized by interdependencies, any innovation attempt will be faced with complex interfaces also within and among all these settings. The purpose of this paper is to shed light over this issue through the investigation of the interface between policy and a specific innovation journey. The attention is directed to the creation and distribution of social-material values; and the translation of these values into a monetary dimension.

To fulfill this aim the authors utilize an empirical study on the commercialization of university research results in the field of solar power technology, based on the ARA model as a conceptual and methodological foundation, with a focus on the establishment of resource combinations, activity links and actor bonds in the involved developing, producing and using settings. In order to pin-point the creation of social-material values and the establishment of a monetary dimension the authors used a model adapted from Håkansson and Olsen (2015).

From a national policy perspective, the transnational nature of innovation processes and the connectedness of resources across different, often far-away places, entail a loss of control on the social-material and monetary benefits of innovation; even more so if the policy of one country stands against that of another country. Still, not only policy but also representatives for academic research and business seem to consider the transnational aspect as an exception.

Due to that the embedding in the user setting did not occur as expected; with the Swedish focal firm as main interface, but from a Chinese firm that the authors did not have access to, the main focus is on the developing and the producing setting, while the embedding in the user setting is covered through indirect information.

The role that established production structures have for the embedding of innovations into producing and using settings seems to be neglected in policy circles – although these have a strong impact on the creation of social-material value and a monetary flow.

See practical implication.

The paper underlines the impact of interfaces with established production structures for the creation of social-material value and monetary flow – and for transnational dimension of the innovation journey.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce a special issue about the construction industry and the management of its supply chains. It aims to discuss and point to some differences and possible similarities with traditional manufacturing and its supply chains.

The paper is mostly a literature review and contains official statistics.

The market of the construction company is mostly local and highly volatile. The long durability of the construction “product” contributes to the volatility. The product specification process before the customer order arrives shows different degrees of specifications: engineer to order, modify to order, configure to order, select a variant. (The common make‐to‐stock in traditional manufacturing does not exist.) A construction company only executes a small part of the project by its own personnel and capacity. This is a way of risk spreading and risk mitigation and to compensate for an unstable market. If a construction company wants to establish a new concept, from “engineer to order” to e.g. “configure to order”, it must be engaged earlier in the business process and with other than usual customers, which might complicate the process.

Experiences from Sweden and Swedish developments are the main source of information.

The paper introduces the articles that are a source of scientifically generated knowledge regarding various problems and opportunities associated with supply chain management in the project‐based construction industry.

Exploratory research was undertaken focusing upon an innovation adoption decision taken by a regional UK division of a large international contracting organisation implementing building information modelling (BIM) into their project delivery processes. The purpose of this paper was to gain new insights through observations of the process and analysis of the views of employees about organisational BIM adoption during the implementation stage of the innovation-decision process.

Case study research was performed focussing on initial BIM projects delivered by an early adopter organisation. Observations and semi-structured interviews were used as part of a data collection strategy, and an iterative research approach was adopted.

During implementation stages of BIM innovation adoption, organisations may have to make use of hybrid project delivery methods on initial adopter projects while also working concomitantly with existing systems, processes and personnel not yet ready to adapt to BIM methodology.

The work captures previously unseen phenomena of how such an organisation and its staff have adapted to BIM innovation adoption during a programme of organisational change. The identification of hybrid project delivery processes has generated further implications for practice and research into the effectiveness of construction production information management.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a methodological approach to design product service systems based on an active participation of customers to the value production process. Furthermore, the paper aims to present methods and techniques that can be used to understand local context and highly individualized needs, and to integrate local actors, including users in the value production process.

Methods and tools presented in this paper are structured into three main categories: analytical tools, development tools and representation techniques. Such tools will be illustrated through examples from case studies.

Methods and techniques presented in this paper are borrowed from other disciplines and adapted to the task of service design. The new methods relate to a new paradigmatic framework and are not easy to compare with existing methods, they are rather complementary to existing knowledge on service design.

The new methodological approach implies a shift in the role of industrial companies that are supposed to leave their prominent role in value creation and become facilitators of a process of value co‐production.

This paper considers a fundamental change in the role for customers and industrial companies in the value‐creation process. Consequently, it presents a methodological approach to support such change.

Employee benefits with regard to expatriate workers can be a time‐consuming and complex area for corporate management. Problems arise because these expatriate workers tend to be mobile, their working locations can be unpredictable in many ways and their retirement location may be uncertain. Some possible solutions to these problems for a company providing a benefit plan for its expatriate employees are outlined, and their relative advantages and disadvantages are detailed.