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Examines the tenth published year of the ITCRR. Runs the whole gamut of textile innovation, research and testing, some of which investigates hitherto untouched aspects. Subjects discussed include cotton fabric processing, asbestos substitutes, textile adjuncts to cardiovascular surgery, wet textile processes, hand evaluation, nanotechnology, thermoplastic composites, robotic ironing, protective clothing (agricultural and industrial), ecological aspects of fibre properties – to name but a few! There would appear to be no limit to the future potential for textile applications.

Increased disposal costs and reduction in number of landfills have created a need for implementing effective waste management in the construction industry. As every construction project is unique in its way of development, benefits from the waste management may also differ from project to project and thus project characteristics should be taken into consideration when implementing the strategy. This study seeks to investigate how different project characteristics affect perception on benefits, from construction waste management, based on the survey results from 66 industry experts.

A literature review was conducted to gather information on project characteristics and its classification, construction waste management, waste management plan and its benefits. Subsequently, a set of questions was formulated to gain insight and opinion on the selection of project characteristics and particular benefits of construction waste management. A set of questions pertaining to different project characteristics linked with benefits of waste management was sent to each of the personnel for their views.

The results of this study establishes that the key materials used in projects, project size in terms of total installed costs, and project type have perceptual impacts on benefits from construction waste management.

Understanding how project characteristics will affect the benefits can help the construction industry to identify projects to which the waste management should first be applied, maximizing its benefits.

The purpose of this paper is to study how project-level performance mediates the effect of project management assets on firm-level performance by examining the direct and mediated relationships between the project management process characteristics: valuable, rare, inimitable and organizationally supported on project-level and firm-level performance outcomes.

This paper analyzes data from an online survey completed by 198 North American Project Management Institute® members. Linear regression and Sobel Tests are used to examine the relationships between nine factors extracted from an exploratory factor analysis that comprise project management asset characteristics, one factor that comprises project-level performance outcomes, and one factor that comprises firm-level performance outcomes.

Not only does project-level performance positively and significantly affect firm-level performance, but project-level performance also significantly mediates the effect of project management asset characteristics (for all nine factors) on firm performance.

Limitations of this study include sample size and self-report bias, calling for a larger sample in ongoing research.

This study contributes to the stream of literature on project management assets as sources of competitive advantage and makes the case for sustained organizational investments in the project management process.

This paper contributes to the limited, but increasing interest in applying the resource-based view of the firm to project management capabilities as a source of competitive advantage.

This paper explores how task characteristics in terms of trigger type and task topic influence individual participation in community-based free/libre open source software (FLOSS) development by considering participation in individual tasks rather than entire projects.

A quantitative study was designed using choose tasks that were carried out via the email discourse on the developers' email fora in five FLOSS projects. Choice process episodes were selected as the unit of analysis and were coded for the task trigger and topic. The impact of these factors on participation (i.e. the numbers of participants and messages) was assessed by regression.

The results reveal differences in participation related to different task triggers and task topics. Further, the results suggest the mediating role of the number of participants in the relationships between task characteristics and the number of messages. The authors also speculate that project type serves as a boundary condition restricting the impacts of task characteristics on the number of participants and propose this relationship for future research.

Empirical support was provided to the important effects of different task characteristics on individual participation behaviors in FLOSS development tasks.

The findings can help FLOSS participants understand participation patterns in different tasks and choose the types of tasks to attend to.

This research explores the impact of task characteristics on participation in FLOSS development at the task level, while prior research on participation in FLOSS development has focused mainly on factors at the individual and/or project levels.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze risk profiles of projects based on project characteristics and provide key managerial insights.

A total of 37 project cases from engineering and construction (E&C), information system/technology (IS/IT), and new product development (NPD) sectors with detailed information on project characteristics and risks were identified from published literature. An integrated framework was developed to analyze the prominent risk categories associated with novelty, technology, complexity, and pace (NTCP) project characteristics.

Within-sector analysis revealed that schedule, resource, and scope risks are the most prominent risk categories in E&C, IS/IT, and NPD projects, respectively. Similarly, interesting key insights have been drawn from detailed cross-sector analysis, depicting different risk categories based on NTCP project characteristics.

The findings are based on the case studies adopted from the literature that provides details of project characteristics and risk profiles.

Depending upon the risks associated with different project characteristics, an integrated framework developed in the study can be used for the development of highly authentic risk management plans at the onset.

This is one of the earliest studies to provide an integrated risk framework for projects based on their NTCP characteristics. The two contrasting perspectives of within-sector and cross-sector analyses were adopted. Overall, the study will enhance the future preparedness toward risks.

Many users build personal projects in co-innovation community to accomplish their innovations. However, very few projects from such communities are successful and understanding of this phenomenon is limited. The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors facilitating user projects success in online co-innovation communities.

Based on the theories of persuasion and diffusion of innovation (DOI), a conceptual model is proposed to explain how project success likelihood is affected by the creator, project and user participation characteristics. Then, the model and hypotheses are tested through binary logistic regression on a secondary data set of 572 projects collected from a typical user co-innovation community, Local Motors.

The results show that creator characteristics (prior success rate), project characteristics (project popularity, length and duration) and user participation characteristics (participation users and degree) have significant and positive impacts on project success likelihood. The number of prior projects, which can hardly represent the creator’s credibility in open and unrestricted situations, has no significant influence on the project success likelihood.

This study offers project creators the keys to increase their projects successful possibility. Besides, this study recommends a new way to attract users and helps to identify creative and effective users for community practitioners.

This study expands the research scope in online co-innovation community by focusing on user personal projects. In addition, it combines persuasion theory and DOI theory to add the holistic understanding of user project success likelihood.

The purpose of this study is to extract the real requirements of the owner (or users) for the construction project in the operation and maintenance stage completely and accurately and carry out the construction based on the requirements, to make the project status and operation and maintenance requirements (RO&M) consistent after delivered.

This study creatively proposes the operation and maintenance functions deployment (OMFD) under RO&M. In addition, the OPAR (naming is made up of the initials of owners, project, analysis and result) model is constructed to fully identify the requirements of both owners and projects. In this study, three typical construction projects are taken as examples to calculate the correlation strength between project characteristics (PC) and operation and maintenance requirements through the Apriori algorithm, and order parameters are obtained from the cost chain.

This study found that there are significant differences in the correlation strength between 11 types of RO&M and PC, in which the “cost of types” (TC) correlation of residential housing and factory buildings is the largest, while the largest correlation demand of commercial buildings is “safety of types” (TS) and “system” (S). Simultaneously, through the calculation of order parameters, the most influential factors on project characteristics are obtained.

This study could effectively help the owner (or users) to check whether the delivered project fully satisfy their real requirements and also extract the key technical points to realize RO&M, which can guide the accurate construction of the same type of projects.

This research establishes OPAR model to accurately identify the requirements of the project in the operation and maintenance stage and establishes the association rules between the requirements and the construction scheme, which is helpful for the project to construct under the expected requirements.

Collaboration is thought to offer significant benefits over traditional contracts, however there is little existing research concerning how these benefits can be optimized. To address this gap, a survey investigated the impact of client characteristics on the time and cost efficiency of collaborative infrastructure projects. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The survey of experienced senior practitioners of Australian collaborative infrastructure projects yielded 320 valid responses. Cluster analysis, one-way between group ANOVA tests and independent sample t-tests were used to confirm that three client characteristics are critical to time and cost performance: client sector (public/private); client experience with asset procurement; and client approach to price competition.

Projects procured by experienced private sector clients were found to meet targeted levels of performance, regardless of their approach to team selection. Among projects procured by experienced public sector clients, groups of relatively low and high performing projects could be distinguished, regardless of their approach to team selection. Projects run by teams selected competitively on non-price criteria prior to the pricing stage exhibited significantly better performance than those run by teams that competed on the price of the project to win the work.

This study focussed only on analysis of three client characteristics. Future research may consider a broader range of contextual variables. Results are based on perceptual data rather than objective data.

The findings show collaborative infrastructure clients in the construction sector should be less concerned about inexperience than they might have been, and more interested in single-team selection approaches than they might have been.

The results indicate significant performance differences between client types. In particular, experienced public sector clients had more polarized performance outcomes, compared to the private sector.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the relationship between the demographic characteristics of top management teams (TMTs) (i.e. age, gender, administrative level, senior management experience and educational background) and megaproject performance, with respect to schedule, cost, quality, safety and technological innovation. The results shed new light on the effectiveness of different types of TMT.

This paper collected secondary and objective data from 208 TMT members in 42 megaprojects and employed hierarchical regression analysis to test the research hypotheses.

The findings revealed that age has a significant influence on schedule performance; gender has a significant influence on safety performance; senior management experience has a significant influence on cost performance; and educational background has a significant influence on both schedule and technological innovation performance. However, this study did not find evidence of a significant relationship between the administrative level and megaproject performance.

This paper mainly focused on China’s megaprojects, most of which are globally influential (e.g. Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macao Bridge and Shanghai Expo), however this sampling approach still limits the generalizability of research findings to other contexts.

The results of this paper contribute to a better understanding of how management team capabilities translate into better project achievements. This paper also provides implications on the criteria for selecting top megaproject managers to optimize the composition of the TMT and realize better performance.

This study aims to investigate the schedule deviation in road construction projects and the effect of project physical characteristics on schedule deviations. The study also addresses the main factors affecting time deviation in road construction projects.

The study is based on a sample of 101 road construction projects awarded in the West Bank in Palestine over the years 2010-2015. The study investigates the time deviation in total project duration and the deviations in major activities of road construction projects: earthworks, base works and asphalt works. Based on the collected data, regression models are developed to show the relation between actual duration and estimated duration. The study also investigates the effect of project physical characteristics on time deviation through regression analysis. The considered characteristics are: project size, terrain conditions, ground conditions and soil quality. To identify the main factors affecting time deviation, a survey of 40 contractors and 30 consultants was performed.

The study reveals the following: average of time deviations in earthworks = 46.48 per cent, average of time deviation in base works = 29.66 per cent, average of time deviation in asphalt works = 23.43 per cent and average of time deviation in total duration = 47.72 per cent. Regression models that investigate the effect of physical project characteristics (i.e. project size, terrain condition, ground condition and soil quality) on time deviation are discussed. The survey reveals that the top five factors affecting delay in road construction projects are political situation, payments delay by the owner, lack of coordination between construction parties, frequent change orders and unexpected ground condition and terrain.

This study investigates the schedule deviation in road construction projects and the effect of project physical characteristics on schedule deviations. The study also addresses the main factors affecting time deviation in road construction projects. The study is based on field data collected from 101 road construction projects and a questionnaire survey conducted in the West Bank in Palestine. Based on the findings, a number of recommendations are formulated to control the problem of time deviation in construction projects. Although this study is specific to the country of Palestine, its results can be applicable to other developing countries facing similar problems in their public construction sectors.