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A central platform to exchange best practices and ideas guiding the infrastructure and urban development industry in its transformation, and helping it to address its key challenges.

Featured Blog Posts

How business decision-makers can stimulate visionary thinking: Studying scenarios to navigate a volatile future

Scenarios have the power to anticipate potential systemic transformations, enable the necessary strategic dialogue between key stakeholders, to analyse change and as a consequence unlock novel and visionary approaches. According to the OECD “The goal in using scenarios is to reveal the dynamics of change and use these insights to reach sustainable solutions to the […]

Why Megaprojects Need A Tech Revolution: Lessons from Carillion

The collapse of Britain’s second-largest construction firm, Carillion, is symptomatic of a larger problem. Globally, construction performs poorly compared to other sectors. The underlying cause of the sector’s underperformance: construction lives in the 19th Century. Across any measure of process or technological advancement—be it software tools, big data, modularization, digitalisation, or the use of lean […]

How Latin America and the Caribbean can unlock its digital potential

The region can learn lessons from first movers to leapfrog to success Digitising the built environment could revolutionise service provision and how we build and deliver the underlying infrastructure and real estate assets.   Figure 1: Percentage urban and location of urban agglomerations with at least 500,000 inhabitants, 2014. Source: UN, World Urbanisation Prospects: The […]

New Report available | An Action Plan to Accelerate Building Information Modeling (BIM) Adoption

BIM is the centerpiece of the construction industry’s digital transformation, however BIM adoption is still too slow Download the full report here In the last decades the construction industry has failed to keep up with productivity gains made in other industries, hampering national economies’ wider growth, societies’ well-being and the solution of environmental issues. Emerging […]

U.S. Construction Productivity: Not as Bad as you Think

We are all familiar with presentations bemoaning the archaic nature of the construction industry.  Something radical must be done!  The story is that the construction industry has experienced decades of stagnant productivity growth, at least in the US. There has been some push back. Output measures have been questioned. Metrics that allocate benefits associated with […]

New Report available | Shaping the Future of Construction: An Action Plan to solve the Industry’s Talent Gap

The construction industry needs to take actions to close its talent gap as one major hurdle for its digital transformation Recently, transformative technological developments, like 3D-printed houses, automated construction equipment and pre-fabricated skyscrapers, emerged. The digital transformation of the construction industry has the potential to uplift the decade-long stagnating productivity of the industry which is […]

Where people live the longest

How NEOM could set a new lifespan record for its future Citizens by designing a $500-billion-megacity community of rejuvenation and happiness. Following the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 to transition into a post-oil economy, his country has just announced a plan to build a megacity on the coast of the Red Sea, NEOM, […]

It costs trillions of dollars to settle commercial conflicts. It’s time for Alternative Dispute Resolution

More commercial disputes happen in energy, mining, infrastructure and urban development than in other industries. Projects in these sectors demand long timeframes and the co-ordination of large numbers of organisations, both of which cause friction. Consequently, conflict management and dispute resolution techniques have advanced fast. Why do disputes matter? Commercial disputes are like toxins. They cause […]

These homes of the future will bring nature indoors

Rethinking how we build shelter may be an important step in increasing sustainability. One such possibility involves creating permeable buildings that interact with the natural world. Traditional buildings are designed to provide protection against a savage world, with us safe on one side and our waste on the other. Architects have long relied on ‘hard’ […]

How automation and technology will change the buildings we live in

Our built environment and its entire value chain are in the wake of a severe transformation. Artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things, robotics and other technologies are not only responsible for the emergence of smart cities, automated processes and new business opportunities, but a change to the rules underpinning the real estate industry. The impact […]

Artificial Intelligence Meets Construction

Technology shapes so much around us. Cars no longer need gasoline. Home appliances respond to voice commands. Ten thousand songs reside on a wristwatch. All of this (and much more) can be traced back to the next technological paradigm shift that is artificial intelligence. Software has evolved from rigid, binary engines to learning systems that […]

Innovation Cases

Case Studies about state-of-the-art implementation of innovation and start ups/pilot projects to showcase innovative approaches in a slow-moving industry and derive lessons for the entire E&C industry to foster adoption of new tools and technologies, processes, organizations and business models.

Challenges