Offsite construction: sustainable innovation futures using SMART approaches

Offsite manufacturing has been advocated as a potential lever for addressing the increased emphasis placed on construction stakeholders to meet the challenges of sustainable construction. These challenges include a myriad of issues ranging from green agenda-driven polices and initiatives, through to new strategies and formal mechanisms that are purposefully aligned to meet sustainable metrics and indicators. Whilst it is acknowledged that construction (inter alia) has been somewhat entrenched in a raft of potential ‘ways forward’, the resurgence of new collaborative approaches using technology – especially Building Information Modelling and SMART components provides promising opportunities for exploitation. This research presents an illustration of the potential to integrate design, development and delivery of products and services using offsite construction as an exemplar. The research methodological approach adopted employed a mixed-method research design, which included a series of discursive on-line interviews with domain experts to collect primary data, followed by a workshop to validate findings. These findings emphasised the importance of providing information ‘transparency’ in order to fully maximise and exploit offsite manufacturing technologies and processes to not only leverage success per se, but also enhance the collaborative working practices of (seemingly) disparate stakeholders.