Organizing for digital transformation: a business ecosystems perspective

The sector of the built environment have an opportunity to act in a digital transformation of current services and products and the way of organizing production methods and work processes.

The basis for the transformation lies in the large amounts of data that the built environment generates, which creates completely new value-creating opportunities in terms of re-organization and integration of processes and thereby also completely new types of business opportunities.

But what is required to exploit this potential?The sector of the built environment can be viewed as an ecosystem of a variety of actors, such as private and public developers, construction and installation contractors, architects, technical consultants and material suppliers, who jointly create value through the buildings and infrastructure that are planned, designed, produced and used.

While value creation in this ecosystem traditionally has been tied to the physical building object, the digital transformation transfers the possibilities for value creation to the use of large amounts of data of the built environment.

This in turn means extensive changes to the organization of the ecosystem and challenges the way companies traditionally produce, deliver and use services and products.

In this development, companies from other ecosystems that are based on digital business models and new start-ups may challenge the sector.

The transition to a new digital business landscape therefore demands new business models, competencies and relationships, both between companies and organizations within the current ecosystem of the sector and to companies and organizations in other ecosystems.

There is thus a great need for new types of value chains and business models in order for the sector to be able to manage and use a digital transformation in a positive way, both from a business and social point of view.While the new digital business landscape will look radically different from the established, the transition will be based on past investments.

This is the basis for learning and developing further.

Based on the results of a previous project in Smart Built Environment: Digitaliseringsdrivna värden och affärsmodeller i samhällsbyggnadssektorns ekosystem: En detaljerad framtidsspaning (Löwstedt & Sundquist, 2022), which produced future scenarios for digital transformation, the goal of this project is to investigate and create a deeper understanding of the capabilities for change in a digital transformation within the sector of the built environment.

Capabilities for change is about using and developing internal and external competencies to deal with a changing environment.

With the goal of creating an overview of such current capabilities of various actors in the sector and for the sector as a whole, the purpose of this project is to identify, discuss, and be part of ongoing and future re-organization of digital processes and ways of organizing.

The study is based on interviewing and gathering actors who represent not only the current, but also the transient and potentially future ecosystem (the actors identified by the previous project, Samhällsbyggarna (traditional), Digitizers (digital suppliers to the current sector) and Game Changers (based on digital business models), as well as actors from other sectors that have undergone transition),  in order to understand which internal and external competencies that can influence the re-organization of the sector and potential success factors.