BIM adoption modes in construction projects: A cluster analysis of motivations and capabilities in China

With its great potential to facilitate the sustainable development of the built environment, the adoption of BIM as a systemic innovation is associated with complex efficiency-legitimacy motivations embedded in heterogeneous capability contexts. Drawing upon a configuration perspective, this study aims to explore how different dimensions of intrinsic motivations and capability contexts are concurrently configured as different modes of BIM adoption in construction projects and result in varied performance outcomes. Based on the cluster analysis of project-based BIM adoption data in China, the results provide robust evidence for four BIM adoption modes with significantly different motivation-capability configurations: efficiency-motivated mode, strategy-motivated mode, multi-motivated mode, and under-motivated mode. While strategy-motivated and multi-motivated modes are illustrated to be the two most generally used modes, the efficiency-motivated mode exhibits the highest levels of both BIM implementation extent and success, providing evidence that the adoption of BIM as a high-profile digital technology has become a highly institutionalized economic endeavor under the impacts of external institutional environments. This study contributes to a deepened understanding of how innovation adoption as an institutionalized economic endeavor could exhibit consistently different motivation and capability configurations and how such configurations could be more efficiently managed to foster a healthier paradigm for the advancements of innovative solutions in the conservative project-based construction practices during the ongoing digital and sustainable transformation wave.