The Unassuming Economist

A new White Paper from the World Economic Forum says that:

“While most other industries have undergone tremendous changes over the past few decades and have reaped the benefits of process, product and service innovations, the construction sector has been hesitant to fully embrace the latest innovation opportunities and its labour productivity has stagnated or even decreased over the last 50 years.

This mediocre track record can be attributed to various internal and external challenges: the persistent fragmentation of the industry, inadequate collaboration between the players, the sector’s difficulty in adopting and adapting to new technologies, the difficulties in recruiting a talented and futureready workforce, and insufficient knowledge transfer from project to project, among others.

In the context of the Forum’s Future of Construction initiative, over the past year six Working Groups comprised of industry leaders, academics and experts met regularly to develop and analyse innovative ideas, their impact, the barriers to implementing solutions and the way forward to overcoming obstacles and implementing modern approaches in the construction and engineering industry.

This white paper presents the outcome of this work in the form of insight articles proposing innovative solutions on how to address the construction sector’s key challenges in the following fundamental challenge areas:

1. Project Delivery – Creating certainty of timely delivery and to budget, and generally improving the productivity of the construction sector
2. Life cycle Performance – Reducing the life cycle costs of assets and designing for re-use
3. Sustainability – Achieving carbon-neutral assets and reducing waste in the course of construction
4. Affordability – Creating high-quality, affordable infrastructure and housing
5. Disaster Resilience – Making infrastructure and buildings resilient to climate change and natural disasters
6. Flexibility, Liveability and Well-being – Creating infrastructure and buildings that improve the well-being of end-users”