The construction industry generally has a conservative attitude towards adopting innovations. Previous studies extensively focused on explaining the working of new technologies, and how they can be implemented. However, the process of adoption of new construction technologies by companies for transport infrastructure construction projects such as tunneling is totally unexplored. The purpose of this paper is to present a framework for the adoption process of new advanced technologies in transport infrastructure construction. The framework consists of eight stages that a company passes through in adopting a new technology. A semi-structured interview (SSI) protocol was developed and used to understand the underlying multiple objective decision-making process, and the various stages of the adoption process. Ten construction industry practitioners including railway, tunneling and earthmoving contractors discussed a total of twenty one technologies ranging in cost from $0.75M to $45M, including drilling rigs for bridge construction, blind bore shaft drills for rail development and advanced tunnel boring machines (TBM). The data obtained was analyzed using thematic analysis, and axial and selective coding techniques. The model proposed in the paper – referred to here as construction technology adoption framework – incorporates the identification of solutions, the purchase decision, and the implementation. The novel framework will assist technology policy makers and vendors to better understand the adoption process, and predict customers’ decision behavior in order to facilitate and speed up the adoption process in the heavy infrastructure construction industry.
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Sepasgozar et al. (2014) studied this question.