Lessons Learned in the Construction Industry Extracting Collaborative Components

Collaboration is purported to be vital to construction project effectiveness and efficiency. It seems that regardless of context and scope, collaboration is consistently attributed to be an essential determinant of success, effectiveness and efficiency in construction projects. However, there has been almost no empirical work done to assess, objectively, the importance of collaborative components on various aspects of collaboration. Furthermore, no empirical work has been done to quantify explicitly the extent to which different collaborative components, in relation to other components, improves construction project effectiveness and efficiency. This study attempts to fill this research gap by presenting a discussion on lessons learned in the Danish construction industry. It implores the question why no systematic effort has been made to make this explicit purported all-important link between collaborative components and effective and efficient collaboration. Therefore, it is in this area—providing a quantification of the linkage between collaborative components and effective and efficient collaboration—that this study makes its contribution. This discussion paper used a literature based design to assess lessons learned about collaboration in the Danish construction industry. By systematically reviewing all publicly funded reporting’s from experimental buildings projects in the Danish construction industry different collaboration related elements were identified. The reports are from the period 1991–2015, all concerning collaboration end the effect of so on the project. A subsequent discussion of the element produced new themes for further research.