Research Reports

The construction industry has faced critical challenges such as declining workforce, skills shortage, and low productivity of construction projects. In this context, the construction industry considers smart technologies(e.g., BIM, big data, AI, drone, modular, AR, VR, 3D printing, connected equipment, robotics, and etc), which has been developed and emerged in recent, as a measure for overcoming the challenges and improving the productivity and profitability of construction projects. On the other hand, it is hard to apply the smart technologies in the construction industry because of barriers such as low flexibility of traditional production systems, risks of construction companies (ex. cost, schedule, and etc) for applying the technologies, and others. This research presents the smart technology application status of Korean construction companies, and suggests strategies for activating the applications. For this, the authors conduct a questionnaire survey about application level, activation outlook, adoption plan, and measures for expert supply. According to the analysis results, 88.2% of Korean construction companies don’t know or use the smart technologies, and only 11.8% of the companies apply the technologies in their projects. Besides, 63.9% of responding companies consider that smart technology would be activated within 10 years in the construction industry. Relating the adoption plan, only 30.6% of the construction companies already applied smart technologies or have an adoption plan within 10 years. Lastly, 59.5% of responding construction companies response that they prefer ‘outsourcing’ to ‘fostering internal human resource through retraining(20.0%)’ and ‘new employment for the experts(19.9%)’. Especially, in case of large-sized general contractors, 49.1% of responding companies already partially applied the smart technologies in their projects, and 86.6% of the companies consider that the smart technologies are activated within 10 years. In addition, 84.8% of responding large-sized construction companies have an adoption plan within 10 years. Relating the measure for expert supply, the large-sized general contractors prefer the ‘fostering internal human resource through retraining(38.4%)’ than other responding groups. Based on these analysis results, this research recognizes that the large-sized general contractors could be classified as ‘early adopters’ of Technology Adoption Life-Cycle, which is a sociological model describing an adoption or acceptance pattern of a new technology, and the other groups could belong to an ‘early majority’ or ‘late majority’. Considering these classification, this research also proposes 4 step strategy for activating the smart technology in construction industry, which comprises ‘① awareness improvement of smart technologies’, ‘② positive cognition enhancement of smart technology’, ‘③ introduction efforts of smart technologies’, and ‘④ activation of smart technology in construction industry’.