The construction sector is one of the biggest consumers of raw materials and generates large amounts of construction waste as well. CE is a way to delink the construction sector from the consumption of finite resources of the earth and excessive waste generation. Despite of the fact that there are a lot of interventions, such as Commodity agreement, Transition Agenda, it is not clear how CE can be executed in practice. This research aims to develop a guidance and a framework on the adoption of more circular innovative technologies in construction projects and to propose an approach that can support involved parties in order to realize more circular construction projects. This research adopts a unique approach in transitioning the construction sector to a CE using Service Dominant Logic (SDL). One of the key sources of non – adoption of CE is the lack of harmony or agreement on a suitable definition of CE for the construction sector. This may compromise the process of decision-making and eventually lead to ineffective policy interventions. Successfully implementing CE in the construction sector needs a definition that covers the whole construction supply chain to provide understanding of material flows in the economy.

Public construction projects have an image of poor performance, both in the Netherlands and other countries. Too many public projects go over budget and over time. A possible improvement to this poor performance could be Early Contractor Involvement (ECI). ECI literally translates to involving a contractor “early”, which in current practice implies that the contractor is involved before the design phase. As a more unambiguous definition was missing for this principle in the Netherlands, this research identified two varieties of ECI; a consulting form (like a market consultation) or a contracting form, where the contractor is contracted during the final stages of the initiation phase. ECI is suggested in literature to be a promising option to improve public construction projects in the Netherlands, but literature is split on what ECI is and what the benefits are. This thesis study aims to identify the effects, implications and implementation of ECI in the Netherlands. From this study, eight potential benefits of ECI have been identified by means of a Delphi study. Some examples of these benefits are improved risk assessment, risk distribution, higher project quality and higher certainties in both costs and planning. However, reaping these benefits requires preparation and experiments with projects using ECI. There currently seems to be no initiatives with ECI on the agenda, except the refurbishment project of the Hoevelaken intersection. To implement ECI in the Dutch public construction industry, this research found several conditions to implement and use ECI. Firstly, the role division of the client, design firm and contractor should be done differently. Secondly, the distribution of the risks must change. And thirdly, procurement may have to be specifically designed for ECI. In addition to these conditions, there are three barriers to overcome. These barriers are primarily concerned with the client side of the market. The client fears the early commitment to just one contractor and finds it hard to secure the competition in the market properly when ECI is used. Following these two barriers is a third; there is a lack of determination to experiment and implement ECI. To help overcome these barriers, four incentives are identified to be applied simultaneously: • An investment from the public sector to experiment with ECI, • Design of a proper exit-clause to terminate the contract, • The use of Past-Performance criteria for procuring projects with ECI, • The application of incentives on contractor behavior. When ECI is implemented in public construction in the Netherlands, ECI will have implications on both public construction projects and the construction industry. In procurement the criteria other than price are likely to become more important, as price is unrealistic to test on so early in a project. Contractors will have to develop their advising role and expand their designing/engineering capacity. As their expertise and capabilities develop, design and engineering work is likely to flow from the design firms to the contractors. The engineering expertise of the client must expand as well, to be able to communicate on the same level as the contractors to prevent communication errors and opportunistic behavior. This research suggests that ECI can indeed improve public projects on several aspects, but if there are too few experiments to develop and improve the concept it is unlikely to see implementation soon. As communication, perseverance and determination are key in experimenting with something new, this thesis advocates investing in ECI experiments with people who are capable and willing to try to make ECI work. Proper preparation and learning from the experiments will create forward momentum. When forward momentum is gained, ECI could be disproved to work or be proved a working innovation in the construction market, marking the next market improvement on the road to collaboration in the construction industry.

This thesis describes how contractors in the water construction industry can capture and store performance information to present in tenders for Best Value projects. It describes which performances are relevant to present in such tenders, how performance information can be captured during projects and how performance information can be stored within the contractor's organisation for presentation in Best Value tenders.

The client and contractor have to take on a new role in Best Value projects, and this is not as comfortable or intuitive for everyone. People can behave irrationally in conflicts, but conflicts are bound to happen in projects. The objective of this research was to design a set of actions to prevent conflicts in Best Value projects. The first part of the research focused on identifying the main causes of conflict in Best Value projects. The data was gathered through semi-structured interviews with fourteen project managers from clients and contractors to understand how conflicts originate and evolve in Best Value projects. The analysis showed two causes of conflict in Best Value projects. (1) The lack of involvement of the client’s client leads to unnecessary process- and technical-related conflicts during the execution phase. Often the conflicts occur after tasks are completed, and the hand-over takes place. (2) Best Value forces the contractors to prove their trustworthiness towards the clients. However, contractors often do not continue to prove their trustworthiness, which makes the client anxious. This will lead to traditional and controlling behaviour. A set of actions was designed to help contractors and clients to prevent conflicts in the execution phase of their Best Value project. The interviews and expert sessions are the input for activities that could be used. These activities were analysed to identify actions for the clients and contractors in Best Value projects. The actions focus on making sure that the client’s departments can be involved in the projects or on building cognition-based trust during the project.

Recently a new phenomenon introduced itself in the Dutch infrastructure sector called co-creation. It is described in literature as ‘the joint creation of value between a company and its consumers’. It marks a shift in thinking and became a popular concept to increase the participation of consumers around the year 2000. Since then it has spread to other industries. In the service-and product design it already proved to be a good method as benefits such as increased satisfaction among consumers, cost reduction for the firm and innovative ideas has been mentioned in literature. . In this research, seven elements are identified that are found as necessary conditions for the co-creation concept. With decomposing it into elements it was found that the concept became less abstract, making it more practical for project leaders to implement the concept in their projects. Co-creation in the infrastructure sector is about placing the stakeholder in a central position and together identify their needs and investigate how value can be created jointly.

With the rapid development of real estate market, due to trends as the change in the way of working and automation/digitalisation of working processes, flexibility is one of the most important tasks for owner/investors of office buildings to invest in. Currently, 60% of the vacant offices are structural vacant. Flexibility could be used as an instrument to prevent future vacant office space. The flexibility to change characteristics of a building during its life cycle is called the adaptive capacity of a building. Adaptability can be regarded as way to make the real estate supply more dynamic and better able to cope with demand dynamics (static supply and dynamic demand) and in this way extend the functional lifespan of buildings. The problem is that real estate investors are hardly interested in investing in office buildings to increase the adaptive capacity. Thereby, is the most used financial method the DCF method which is currently insufficiently used to simulate the future uncertainty in an investment in flexibility on the longer term. This aim of this research is to illustrate how to cope with the future uncertainty in a new financial method. By using a stochastic approach with the Decision Tree Analysis the investors could be stimulated to invest in the adaptive capacity of office buildings and increase the adaptive capacity of a building to respond if the functional demand changes.

Public bodies acting in the construction industry have to deal with major transitional issues, such as globalization and urbanization, population ageing, climate change and digitalization. Moreover, the public domain, private parties and society are becoming increasingly interdependent. As a result, safeguarding public values in the built environment has become ever more complex. Public bodies face the challenge to adhere to collective public values while confronted with private and societal values of external partners. This means that they have to deal with value pluralism and value-conflicts. In research, scarce attention has been paid to providing guidance to practitioners for dealing with multi-value trade-offs in operational processes. Hence, this research provides a construction-sector specific operationalization and a network perspective to the field of public value research. This research highlights the important role to be played by public commissioning in terms of safeguarding public values. It consists of three qualitative studies that utilize a range of different methods, including interviews, observations and document analysis. By this the research provides a contemporary perspective through which to study and execute the safeguarding of public values by public clients in the transition towards network governance in the construction industry. The dynamics of the sector-specific value interests of public construction clients, the occurrence of value conflicts in commissioning, and the safeguarding processes within both internal and external commissioning are studied. The practical implications derived from the research were translated into a value dialogue tool that can be used by public construction clients to professionalize safeguarding in their daily practice. @en

Architectural firms can be regarded as creative professional service firms. As such, architects need to navigate creative, professional and commercial goals, while simultaneously attempting to fulfil client, user and societal needs. This complex process is becoming increasingly difficult, as the historically established role of architects has become more blurred, contested and heterogeneous. While attempting to reclaim their role or to take on new roles in collaborations with other actors, architectural firms are challenged to develop business models that are financially viable and professionally satisfactory. These business models need to facilitate firms in capturing both financial and professional value in co-creation processes, and they must also suit the project-based structure of the firm. This research contributes insights into how firms might capture multiple dimensions of value in project-based work. It generates new perspectives on processes of organizational value capture and business model design, and provides concrete, practical insights into the difficulties of and opportunities involved in value capture by creative professional service firms.@en