Selecting Organizational Partners for Interorganizational Projects: The Dual but Limited Role of Digital Capabilities in the Construction Industry

Abstract

The selection of partners is critical for the success of interorganizational projects. Based on conceptual reasoning in light of prior research, as well as illustrative empirical insights into an ongoing interorganizational project in the construction industry, we argue that partner selection practices not only target the organizational capabilities of potential partners but they themselves require an organizational capability to search for, evaluate, and select. This article delineates the facets of this capability, reveals the role of digital capabilities therein, and shows that the respective capabilities are crucial for inclusion and exclusion in interorganizational projects. The results also point to capabilities that emerge at the interorganizational nexus.

An Institutional Approach to Digitalization in Sustainability-Oriented Infrastructure Projects: The Limits of the Building Information Model

“…Among the three cases we studied, organization C could be considered more responsive and professionally active compared to organizations A and B. This was mainly due to technological experience and in-house competence and the fact that organization C did not have rigid BIM-based partner selection criteria in their pilot projects [29,74]. Within organization A, although the BIM adoption processes were consistent with institutional demands, the management relied upon rigid criteria and did not open up for the professional responsiveness.…”

Facilitating Digital Transformation in Construction—A Systematic Review of the Current State of the Art

“…Project, time, size, and duration are additional factors that should be considered in determining the choice of digital technologies in construction (Koseoglu et al, 2019). Finally, an entire set of very diverse capabilities is needed for utilizing new technologies (Braun and Sydow, 2019;Aghimien et al, 2020a), and the availability of these capabilities should be strategically considered in the choice of digital investments in construction (Braun and Sydow, 2019).…”

“…Enormous data are increasingly generated in the construction process (Woodhead et al, 2018). It is of strategic importance to consider making such data available (Buisman, 2018) from one technology to another (Pham et al, 2020), from a physical to a virtual world (Woodhead et al, 2018), and from one construction phase to another (Braun and Sydow, 2019). This increases the potential of data analytics in construction, which contributes to smart management and sound decision making (Woodhead et al, 2018;Pham et al, 2020).…”

“…The enthusiasm for such transformations is greater among the young generation of construction employees who are keen to use new technologies and deploy new ways of working (Pham et al, 2020;Soman and Whyte, 2020). They strengthen their technical skills and soft skills such as communication (Braun and Sydow, 2019;Papadonikolaki et al, 2019;Winch and Cha, 2020), which promotes them from digital talents to digital agents (Goulding et al, 2018;Azzouz and Papadonikolaki, 2020). Encouraging the young generation to use digital technologies to perform construction tasks is key to DT in construction (Koseoglu et al, 2019).…”

“…Recently, system support has gradually extended to benchmarking the impact of digital technologies on construction performance bottomlines (e.g., productivity and competitiveness) (Berlak et al, 2020). This has increased cocreation between innovative (or innovators) construction stakeholders and manufacturers such as Autodesk to produce customized digital technologies (Woodhead et al, 2018) and transforming existing digital capabilities in the process (Braun and Sydow, 2019). For robotic design and implementation on construction sites, cocreation between construction stakeholders and manufacturers has helped develop real world-class proofs-ofconcept (Pan et al, 2020) by the pragmatists (Sepasgozar and Loosemore, 2017).…”