New ways of organising construction due to user demands

Paper in proceeding, 2015

This paper investigates how client demands affect organisational renewal in construction, more specifically how the combining of technical and organisational resources are directly and indirectly affected by demands from the user. We adopt an industrial network perspective and focus on inter-organisational interaction between the actors involved in two specific healthcare construction projects in Sweden. The findings show that user demands affect organisational renewal with regard to both onsite and off-site operations and that effects due to user demands can be spread outside the 'temporary' network to the 'permanent' network. Hence, user demands create direct and indirect effects on both the combining of organisational and technical resources across individual projects and organisational boundaries. These findings imply that in order to understand innovation in construction it is necessary to study how technical and organisational resources are combined across organisational boundaries and across projects.