Developing collaborative capacities in industrialised building: Roadmap for knowledge transfer

Industrialized building (IB) has been linked to a number of benefits such as improved worker safety, shortened construction times and less material waste. In Australia’s housing construction industry, however, uptake of industrialised building has been low and a number of key barriers have been identified. Industrialised building requires a fundamental transformative effort in the housing sector. Local experience and international research suggest that barriers can be addressed by large-scale collaboration, but collaboration has not been systematically explored in the industrialised building domain. Our aim in this study is to examine collaborative practice in five innovative supply chains to enrich theoretical conceptualizations of collaboration through a processual framework that uses the stages of actor-network theory as a scaffold (ANT). Each of our five industrialised building case studies had motivations in varying degrees related to safety, health, well-being, and social and environmental sustainability. Qualitative data was gathered from 29 semi-structured interviews. Based on our analysis, we proposed a framework that examines how collaboration develops and evolves across supply chains. We then took this analysis further into a stage of interpretation. We presented a systematic, narrative-centred process of knowledge translation that transforms research findings into actionable knowledge, thus proposing a method for addressing the persistent evidence-to-practice gap in construction. This knowledge translation process allowed us to identify specific competencies that are critical to building collaborative capacity, thus contributing to practice by developing a roadmap towards a comprehensive behavioural framework for collaboration in industrialized building.