Sociotechnical transitions are mostly seen in the literature as processes where actors and technologies in small niches peripheral to an organizational field, accumulate momentum, scale up, aggregate, and eventually bring about large-scale regime change. Foundational examples include the British transition from sailing ships to steamships and the American transition from traditional factories to mass production. Herein lies a paradox, transitions concern large scale system change for example transition to electric cars or renewable energy, but large-scale options for technological change driven by incumbents have received less attention in transitions research. This is an important opportunity for transition research to draw on the literature of project management research on large-scale projects. We bridge transitions research and project management research by exploring speciation and aggregation from both perspectives. We illustrate how this bridge may be instantiated drawing on published research and interviews on six megaprojects that have been instrumental in the digital transformation of UK construction: (i) the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, (ii) Heathrow Terminal 5, (iii) London Olympics, (iv) Crossrail, (v) Thames Tideway and (vi) High Speed Two. The speciation of digital technology seeds the process of aggregation and UK industry transition which is driven by incumbents at the organizational field core and ripples outward to its periphery. This is a reverse process to the one mostly considered in transition research where change initiates in small niches peripheral to an organizational field and propagates until it eventually brings about large-scale change to its core.@en

The systematic combination of interdependent technologies forms the basis of the cyber-physical systems that underpin its digital transformation. New business ecosystems and meta-organisations, such as platforms, are transforming industries widely and are underpinned by digital innovations. This chapter discusses related organising mechanisms and proposes a methodology for generating them in the built environment. It presents business ecosystems, using empirical examples from a range of industries to illustrate how they evolve and operate. The chapter also discusses these principles by contrasting the approaches taken by 'digital natives', to those incumbent firms that develop ecosystems through evolutionary processes. Designers achieve modularity by precisely partitioning information into visible design rules and hidden design parameters. The approach to organising for digitalisation differs between new entrants and incumbent firms. Designing with future states in the forefront is a freeing experience because it removes the design team from the addiction of the latest trend.

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Transitions are processes of systemic change where niches peripheral to a sociotechnical regime accumulate momentum, scale up and eventually transform its core. In contrast to this dominant narrative in transitions research, infrastructure systems exhibit the reverse process as change propagates from the regime core to its periphery. We explore this under-researched process in the case of digitalization in UK construction. We analyse six UK megaprojects that span more than 30 years as a single longitudinal embedded case, and show how the adoption of digital technologies driven by regime incumbents, seeds the processes of technology adaptation, aggregation, and system transformation. The adoption of digital technologies by incumbents is necessary to cope with megaproject scale and scope. Their adaptation to technology instigates organizational level change that starts at the regime core, accumulates with each project and makes these changes ripple across the industry and transform it.

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While ‘soft skills’ are often viewed as add-ons in the digital journey, they are in fact critical in realizing the opportunities created by Industry 4.0 for the construction industry. This chapter focuses on a vital, but oft-neglected aspect of digitalization, namely digital leadership. By exploring understandings of digital leadership in the built environment, we show that digitalization demands that traditional views of leadership are broadened from an existing focus on senior figures in firms to embrace wider views of leadership across supply chains, projects and the industry as a whole. Skills in collaboration and a multi-cultural awareness are important components of this. This enhanced view of leadership is explored and practical examples of their application in firms, supply chains and projects in the construction industry are provided. The teaching case methodology is introduced as a suitable pedagogical approach to address this growing skills gap in the industry and summarise data gathered during recent sessions using this method. The data suggest some ‘dos and don’ts’ for digital leaders operating in the AEC industry and guidance on leading digitalization journeys across supply chains.

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Through a systematic literature review we explore how digital technologies reshape and catalyze digital innovations in the built environment—a highly project-based setting. We analyzed circa 3,000 titles, further narrowed down to 87 articles. We synthesized an original framework for data analysis. The article presents implications for the deployment of digital technologies on three levels: individuals, organizations, and projects. Whereas most of these studies examined the impact of digital innovation in projects, recommendations focused on organizations, suggesting future directions for performance measurement, developing capabilities of firms to manage changes in dynamic environments and interorganizational settings.

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Innovation refers to the development of a new product, service or process (Abernathy and Clark, 1985). Novelty and innovations are often observed in projects (Shenhar and Dvir, 2007). Innovations are highly context-dependent and rely on good projects (Shenhar and Dvir, 2007). Infrastructure megaprojects have a particularly close relationship with innovation (Davies et al., 2009). This relation between innovation and its context, such as infrastructure megaprojects. is important for understanding innovation. Digital innovation is differentiated from other innovations as it is highly pervasive and systemic (Egyedi and Sherif, 2008). This chapter increases our understanding of digital innovation and its relation to institutional contexts, especially infrastructure megaprojects. Focusing on the relation between digital innovation and infrastructure megaprojects, such as London Heathrow and Crossrail (Davies et al., 2009; Dodgson et al., 2015), shows how these infrastructure megaprojects influenced institutions through standardisation to promote digital innovation.@en

Digitization brings profound changes, which require new approaches to organizing. Construction, an institutionalised and heavily regulated industry that demands innovative solutions, is an ideal setting for studying the tensions implicit in digitization. A longitudinal embedded case of a design firm is used to demonstrate the changing approaches used to organizing for digitization as it shapes and is shaped by the wider institutional field. The case study reveals three stages of organizing for digitization: experimentation, leadership and active investment. A cycle of mutual constitution among users, organizational change and institutional events, such as benchmarking, standards and mandates, prepare construction firms, and the industry in general, for digitization. To align innovation with regulation, firms are called to respond to and balance exogenous change with endogenous user-led change.@en