While most other industries have undergone tremendous changes over the past few decades, the construction sector has been slow to adopt new technologies. Even in the United States, the productivity of the construction industry has not increased at all in the past 50 years.

There are multiple reasons explaining the slow evolution of the Construction industry: the lack of innovation corporate culture, siloed thinking, individual project perspective instead of product perspective, the disconnect between main sets stakeholders, traditional contracting and procurement models that focus on initial capital expenditure instead of the full life-cycle, to name just a few.

A few disruptive companies are emerging in different parts of the globe, and proving the value of new technologies on actual construction projects.

An interesting innovation is the building information modeling (BIM): the digital 3D representation of buildings to enhance entire building lifecycle from design, construction, operations to maintenance.

For example, the New Karolinska Hospital’s main contractor, Skanska, was able to use BIM technology to great effect (to keep track of materials, facilitate handover and improve facility management), but concluded that BIM’s potential could be fully realized only if subcontractors and suppliers also worked with the BIM model.

Accordingly, Skanska put considerable effort into persuading them of the value of BIM, discussing their concerns openly and helping them with relevant training where necessary.

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