This study conducts a systematic mapping review of the academic literature published between 2008 and 2025 to examine how architects’ agency is framed, attributed, and conceptualised within construction innovation research. The review maps how scholarship represents architectural contributions, identifies patterns of visibility and omission, and diagnoses gaps in how innovation is recognised, documented, and valued. It asks how scholarship characterises architects’ roles, how such agency shifts across design, procurement, and construction, and what inhibits the dissemination of innovation. Across the mapped corpus, architects are predominantly positioned as innovation enablers who act as knowledge creators, integrators, and collective problem solvers. Their influence is phase contingent and shaped by the social and technical conditions of project delivery. The review also shows that the literature often struggles to attribute, with analytical clarity, such innovation to architects. Authorship is frequently obscured, and the value generated through architectural work is therefore difficult to trace, compare, and transfer. Building on these findings, the paper advances a framework for analysing architect-led construction innovation across four domains: development, recognition, documentation, and evaluation. This framework highlights the institutional checkpoints and leverage points through which architectural contributions can be made legible, comparable, and cumulative, including through comparative case study analysis.
Cardellicchio et al. (Fri,) studied this question.