Fostering Value Co-creation in Construction: A Case Study of an Airport Project in India

Abstract

Infrastructure projects are often large in scale and have great impact on the public in terms of environment, finance, safety and international status. Research studies have been conducted extensively to investigate ways to enhance performance of construction projects, but little emphasis has been put on the importance of the value co-creation process. The airport project in this study adopts the collaboration and value co-creation process between the client and the contractor from the initial stage towards project completion. In the traditional value creation process, clients and construction firms have distinct roles of consumption (i.e., value receiver) and production (i.e., value creator), in which value is created by the design and development of construction products and the value is then exchanged in the markets, amongst consumers and producers. However, value created in this way is created independently of clients. The service-dominant logic, on which value co-creation is grounded, provides a new paradigm for re-examination of value provision through construction projects. The paper aims to explore the importance of value co-creation in the context of an airport project and, more importantly, how value co-creation can be fostered in the construction industry. The project case demonstrates the client and contractor as value co-producers. Different from the traditional procurement approaches which often lack comprehensive consideration of alternatives and /or common goals in the project inception stage, the client and contractor collaborated early in the alternative bidding process and in value management workshops conducted before the inception of construction. In the process of building the client-contractor relationship to achieve the above (value) outputs, two key features are (1) early contractor involvement in the contribution of constructability expertise and (2) the change in the client's attitudes to embrace value co-creation.