Digitialization and business models in the built environment ecosystem: Future scenarios

Research Project, 2021 – 2022

In the era of C onstruction 4.0, several trends and technologies are identified as drivers for how design, construction and facility management in the built environment will change. Future scenarios include new busines models based on digital technologies, such as BIM, laser scanning, AI, cloud-based services, big data, blockchain
and machine learning. The ability to handle more complex data sets, especially from new data sources, imply a shift of how value creation is generated that might threatened or even dramatically disrupt the competition among actors that fail to recreate existing business models. Despite the awareness of digital transformation, present
actors in the sector appear to lack the incentives to invest and advance the use of digital technologies to generate new revenues and exploit new value-producing opportunities. The incentive structure including sub-optimization and ambiguities regarding the distribution of costs and risks related to investments among the actors is identified
as one major obstacle. By applying an eco-system perspective, the research project aims to identify, analyze and catalyze future reconstruction of busines models in relation to digitalization. This is accomplished by a holistic scrutinization of the sector level, project level, company level and their interplay, to identify the potentials residing in digital technologies and digitalization and the call for new business models and new forms of collaboration. The research project involves commitment from a large number of actors representing various roles within the sector,actors related to the sector by their digitalized offerings, and actors from other sectors that has undergone a digital transformation, serving as inspiration for the built environment. Action-based workshops are used as facilitators for education and knowledge sharing with the purpose of accelerating a reaction of both incremental and radical changes in the digitalization era of the bult environment.