• Trust is described as an elusive concept (Gambetta 1988), difficult to describe, understand and, therefore, manage. The Trust in Construction project undertook 6 exploratory case studies, of which 4 are presented in this paper, in order to understand how trust is formed, and the impact this...

Innovation-led performance improvement in the construction industry is significantly influenced by the innovation performance of small firms. There is a dearth of research investigating innovation from the perspective of the small construction firm. This paper contributes to this underdeveloped...

One reason for the interest in performance-based building is that it is commonly advocated as a powerful way of enhancing innovation performance by articulating building performance outcomes, and by offering relevant procurement actors the discretion to innovate to meet these performance...

Small construction knowledge-intensive professional service firms (SCKIPSFs) are becoming increasingly important agents of innovation within the construction industry. The nature and process of innovation in SCKIPSFs, however, is generally considered through the constraining prism of research...

Relevant literature is synthesized to provide a holistic picture of our current knowledge of innovation in small, project-based firms, highlighting significant gaps in the broad areas of ‘focus and outcome’, ‘organizational capabilities’, ‘context’ and ‘process’. Research...

Benchmarking is a systematic process of measuring and comparing an organization's performance against that of other similar organizations in key business activities. The lessons learned from other companies can be used to establish improvement targets and to promote changes in the organization....

The new agenda of sustainability requires a change in emphasis and a change in the criteria through which sustainability is evaluated in planning and design. It requires the adoption of a suitable framework which enables decision makers (designers, planners, local authorities) to understand the...

This paper considers the generic processes involved in structuring an information technology (IT) training strategy to meet a construction organization's business strategy. It identifies and discusses how generic and specific IT training needs can be affected by the availability and priority of...

Information technology (IT) has often been cited as being able to create competitive advantage. However, the degree of leverage is often dependent upon several factors, not least the type and level of IT training provided, resources available, management commitment, and prevailing level of...

By 2003 the first Irish Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects had reached the operational stage. Media reports were emerging of significant differences in the effectiveness of these projects. This research set out to find a means by which effectiveness of PPPs could be increased and to...