Innovation realisation for digitalising Dutch small architecture practices: state of the art review

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 EU has already identified that the proposed digitalisation approach had limited effect on extensively achieving sustainable outcomes. Among the issues is the high complexity that hinders small to medium-sized enterprise (SME) 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 understand better the digitalisation for sustainability success cases within European SMEs, this paper presents the results of a state-of-the-art literature review of academic articles, followed by a state-of-evidence review of grey literature. The focus of the review is Dutch small architectural practices (SAPs). The results highlight the importance of project information requirements for SMEs and the multifaceted digitalisation challenges experienced by SAPs and building design SMEs. This paper also suggests future research areas focusing on innovation realisation.