The new role for emerging digital technology to facilitate IPD and improve collaboration: a disruptive innovation perspective

Emerging digital technologies are critical to the delivery of many of the developments required to achieve IPD. Notwithstanding such a role, this chapter has proposed a new, more disruptive role. It poses the question: How might the industry, an organisation or a motivated individual most effectively leverage an emerging digital technology to disrupt the extant construction industry and promote fundamental change? The answer, in short, is to begin. Begin to learn about emerging technologies. Become more familiar with the development and production of emerging technologies. Build experience in the application and evaluation of emerging technologies. To a significant extent, the choice of technology is of little consequence in this context. To experiment is to reveal the practical possibilities and barriers of change, to become familiar with the nature of change, and to develop a capacity for change. Of course, the new constant is change (Epstein, 2018). Where conventional wisdom might claim that the majority is best served by waiting for the dust of change to settle, reality indicates that the dust is unlikely to settle, ever. Equally, when something like IPD demands such fundamental industry-wide change, it can be tempting just to sit back and wait for the tectonic shift to occur. This chapter has sought to highlight the fact that disruptive change is upon us already, in the form of emerging digital technologies that every one of us can begin to experiment with, and that through such experimentation we can free ourselves, our organisation and our industry to the transformational changes required. The disruptive innovation perspective is a me perspective. We should not leave emerging digital technologies to others. Consumerism is driving the development of emerging digital technology and the opportunity is there for every individual consumer to be the disruptive innovator that will kick-start the IPD revolution.