HBR Staff/Pexels
The $13 trillion global construction industry has long struggled with inefficiencies, delays, and corruption. Traditionally, these have been hard to avoid. The industry is highly fragmented and operates in a complex regulatory environment, it has low digitalization, and suffers from labor shortages and poor planning across its value chain. These issues aren’t easy to fix, either. They often stem from misaligned incentives among stakeholders, limited transparency, asymmetric information, and inconsistent enforcement of regulations and standards. Many of these dynamics play out during the procurement phase, before ground is even broken on a new project.