Facing contemporary challenges, such as climate change, digitalization, and Circular Economy, the construction industry has set ambitious goals on how to build, organize and maintain its social and economic infrastructure. However, the question remains whether the current project-based structure of our industry is suitable for facilitating the systemic change needed to address the current challenges. The Construction Ecosystems Design group aims to obtain insights into the future of interorganizational collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation practices in infrastructure. We are especially interested in understanding the implications of ecosystem thinking for the construction domain. Because the ecosystem concept focuses on dynamic value-based networks on a project-transcending level, it offers a promising perspective to establish the change is required in the construction domain. We study the ecosystems perspective therefore in line with transitions in infrastructure.
We mainly study the conceptualization and application of the ecosystem perspective in market segments related to civil engineering and its potential contribution in dealing with societal challenges. In tight collaboration with a quadruple helix of public organization, private companies, knowledge institutes, and citizens, we are exploring the conditions, implications and potential benefits of value-based ecosystem collaboration. Key in our research is the alignment of incentives and business models around particular value propositions. This means that we explore how the ecosystem perspective of mutual dependencies helps to create societal value by explicating common goals, decrease overall construction costs, minimize tensions between actors and stimulate high-impact innovation, knowledge utilisation and learning.
People involved
