Innovation realisation for digitalisation within Dutch small architectural practises: state of the art and future needs

Abstract

Advancing digitalisation and sustainability is a worldwide priority for the construction sector. With intertwined agendas, digitalisation enables the achievement of sustainable outcomes. That is the case of EU initiatives exploring Building Information Modelling (BIM) as a facilitator to Circular Economy (CE). Thus, standardising BIM implementation through the ISO 19650 information requirements represents a stepping stone towards CE and achieving better sustainable outcomes. Concerning standardisation, a unified digitalisation vision is under development for the European public sector as part of the European Green Deal. However, the European Union has already identified that the proposed digitalisation approach has had limited effect on extensively achieving sustainable outcomes. Amongst the issues is the high complexity that hinders small and medium-sized (SMEs) construction organisations from contributing. This problem is exacerbated by the limited amount of published scientific research evidence explaining how SMEs incorporate resource-hungry digital processes into their resource-limited business models. Therefore, to better understand the digitalisation for sustainability success cases within European SMEs, this paper presents the results of a state of the art (SOTA) literature review of academic articles, followed by a state of evidence (SoE) review of grey literature. The focus of the review is Dutch small architectural practices (SAPs). The results highlight the importance of projects information requirements for SMEs and the multi-faceted digitalisation challenges experienced by SAPs and building design SMEs. This paper also suggests future research areas focusing on innovation realisation (IR).