Structured approach to measure performance in Construction Research and Development: Performance Measurement System Development

Research and development (R&D) activities are identified as vital to address the challenges faced by the construction industry. Despite the importance, there are number of issues that hinder the success of construction R&D activities such as lack of accountability of the R&D resources, inadequate mechanisms to evaluate the success, output not addressing the requirements of the stakeholders, lack of communication and coordination between the parties involved in the R&D process etc. These issues have resulted in producing research results with low applicability and have discouraged the investment towards construction R&D. It has been revealed that the cause of a majority of the issues in construction R&D is directly or indirectly rooted with the lack of evaluation mechanisms implying the need for performance measurement (PM). Therefore this study addresses this eminent need by exploring PM applications and by developing a structured approach to measure the performance of collaborative construction R&D during its lifecycle from initiation, conceptualising, development and launch stages and at the project management. During the exploratory phase of the study, semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire survey were carried out to develop the performance measurement system (PMS). During the explanatory phase, the developed PMS was refined with a series of semi-structured interviews. The data was gathered from principal investigators, researchers and industrial partners involved in collaborative construction R&D work. The study contributes to knowledge by developing a PMS to measure the performance of construction R&D. The