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A conceptual framework has been developed to investigate value innovations within construction companies. A visual metaphor has been defined to model the innovation system where the elements of the model are objectives, strategies, environmental barriers/drivers, and organizational factors. The major idea is that none of the elements of the model alone can explain the innovative capability, and elements as well as their interrelations should be considered concurrently to investigate how the innovation system works in construction companies. An application of the framework has been demonstrated by 11 cases taken from the Turkish construction industry. General findings of the research have been reported as well as specific company examples that demonstrate the major mechanisms of the innovation system. The research findings have revealed that environmental factors can have both hindering and supporting impacts on the innovation system, depending on other elements of the framework. The type of innovations is strongly related to company targets, strategies, strengths/weaknesses, and environmental factors. Moreover, matching of appropriate strategies with organizational properties leads to an increase in innovative capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigation of literature on organizational effectiveness (OE) reveals that the researchers have been in consensus for the difficulty of defining, modeling, and measuring OE, which is important for attaining high performance. Major focuses of this paper are, therefore, to construct a conceptual framework to model OE, to derive major determinants of OE from this framework, and to measure OE by constructing prediction models based on artificial neural network (ANN) and multiple regression (MR) techniques. Based on the proposed framework that investigates OE from the perspectives of organization and its subsystems, business, and macroenvironments, the most significant variables that determine OE have been collected and used as inputs for the two prediction models, which have been constructed by using the information associated with 116 Turkish construction companies obtained from a designed survey. According to the prediction results and comparative study, ANN slightly outperformed the MR model in terms of errors, correlations between desired versus actual outputs, and relations between input-output parameters. The ANN model is proposed for use as a tool to assess company effectiveness and to guide decision makers about the major determinants of OE to increase firm performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of fit between an organization's implementation of project management (PM), and its business level strategy is emphasized in the literature. However, there are a limited number of studies investigating the relationship between business level strategy and implementation of PM in the construction industry. This paper aligns one of the business strategies, namely differentiation, with the PM process. A framework representing differentiation in the construction industry is proposed in this study. Structural equation modelling (SEM) is used to validate the relationship between differentiation and the PM process. The results show that a relationship between differentiation strategy and PM exists. The two types of differentiation are revealed, namely “product variety and speed-related differentiation” (PSD) and “quality and image-related differentiation” (QID). The companies trying to differentiate based on PSD should focus on cost, time and quality management. Change management and project planning are identified as important drivers of differentiation based on PSD. On the other hand, the companies trying to differentiate on QID should consider health, safety and environmental issues as well as quality. Companies should also manage their resources effectively to support the PM process that in turn leads to successful differentiation. Companies can utilize the research findings as a guideline while formulating their differentiation strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Managing knowledge effectively is critical to the survival and advance of a company, especially in project-based industries such as construction. However, capturing knowledge in construction projects is a tedious task, as knowledge is usually experience based, tacit, and hard to pass on to others. In this study, a survey was carried out among eight leading Turkish construction contractors that are operating within the international construction market. The specific objectives of this survey are to find out how the tacit and explicit knowledge are captured, stored, shared, and used in forthcoming projects, as well as major drivers and barriers for knowledge management. Based on the survey, it was determined that most of these firms do not have a knowledge management strategy and a systematic way of capturing and storing tacit knowledge. A conceptual framework is proposed to formalize the knowledge-capturing process within construction companies. To demonstrate how the conceptual framework can be implemented in practice, a Web-based system, namely, Knowledge Platform for Contractors (KPfC) is presented. It is hypothesized that KPfC can be used to manage both tacit and explicit knowledge effectively in construction projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]