Characteristics and Evolution of Innovative Collaboration Networks in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction: Study of National Prize-Winning Projects in China

As the scale and complexity of capital projects continue to increase, so do collaboration requirements among owners, engineers, architects, contractors, and other stakeholders in the project lifecycle. These organizational network challenges can impede successful project delivery. Innovation is a key factor in executing complex projects that require expertise from each party in a collaboration network. Unlike in many other industries, collaborations in architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) project networks are typically temporary and require periods of intense collaboration. In an effort to understand the characteristics and evolutionary paths of innovative collaboration networks in the AEC industry, the authors collected data on more than 200 projects over a 15-year period (2000-2014) that were awarded the State Science and Technology Advancement Prize (SSTAP) of China and examine each of these as innovation collaboration cases. Social network analysis (SNA) techniques are used to understand the network characteristics and to examine the evolutionary patterns over time. The results find the studied innovative collaboration networks to be large and interwoven. Universities, with significantly greater betweenness centralities, serve as key network nodes in spreading creativity and promoting practical-theoretical integrations. This study also reveals that fewer repeated collaborations lead to more innovativeness. In other words, repeated collaborations may have a negative impact on novel and challenging AEC projects. Understanding such characteristics could promote innovations in the AEC industry and aid in the selection of strategic partners to participate in the execution of large and complex AEC projects more efficiently and effectively.