Construction is among the most significant industries globally. It has many unmet needs that are still unattended. All the signals indicate that the industry’s thirst for innovation is steadily growing. It’s not quite the walk in the park yet, but even though, we believe highly in construction tech. We think you should also be curious about it. Here’s why:
The Real-Estate crunch – Old buildings and structures will require renovations soon, and new buildings and structures will be needed to support global urbanism and address a potential infrastructure crunch. When more than half of the world’s population lives in cities, and when many cities were built in a predominantly rural world, more buildings are needed soon.
Massive upskilling, reskilling, and supervision – Built environments are not the only challenge ahead. Meeting the needs for more built space will require more workers and managerial skills. Because professional skills are stretched through the years, the Real-Estate crunch will be accompanied by a work resources crunch. Less experienced workers, scarce materials, and anticipated sustainability benchmarks will mandate efficient management, upskilling, and supervision of both workforce and their professional alignment to the new industry conditions.
Construction productivity is in decline.
(https://edzarenski.com/2020/01/10/construction-volume-growth-e3/)
Transforming industry – changes in construction style, usage requirements, flexibilities, speed of construction, and customers’ expectations – will change the production floors and markets. Israeli construction tech Veev, just raised M400$ to develop its structures as a product approach. Modular, high-speed construction will have a significant effect on conventional construction – and can potentially disrupt how we build, making construction pace faster, but also making sites more populated and challenging to manage.
Beyond the singularity – We are promised that the industry is about to change. But in fact, it has been changing significantly for over 30 years. The construction industry was among the first to adopt mobile phones, CAD platforms, and enterprise management tools such as CRM and ERP. The enterprise and design levels of the construction industry are pulling the production floors of the construction industry at snowpiercer velocity. And in the coming years, we will see more technologies bridging between the enterprise headquarters and the distributed production floors. This change is a prerequisite for the evolution of the industry into the conditions and needs of present markets. Imagine the internet data centers built on old telephone operators’ platforms, instead of innovative networks hardware. We’d be using nickel slots for our data services. The needs of scattered sites, distributed projects, and networked supply chains are springing all over. If you are willing to take a deep breath, you’ll notice them also.
Building the most ubiquitous product in the world – What platform is used by more people than the internet? Where do they spend more time than on social media? The answer is – The build-environments. We live, study, work and move in built spaces. We use the built environment almost 24/7 (except when we go camping). And that’s not going to change, even when we’ll move to the metaverse. With this type of demand, the industry is an attractive space of economic investments and innovations.
Construction leaders are waking up – a few years ago; all the rage was sticking arrows in the construction industry’s conservatism and backdated mentality. It was mainly fancy statements then, but even more now. Leading companies of the construction sectors and observant entrepreneurs haven’t missed the changes that the industry faces, nor do they ignore the 1.6 trillion dollars of growth expected even before the century is over. Innovation is happening in the construction industry if you know where to look for it and how to notice it. New materials, new enterprises, growing concerns such as safety and efficiency, and increased needs for visibility, control, and quality are no longer fantasies of startups but actual missions of construction innovators.
Markets in demand, Industry growing and transforming, and plenty of unmet needs.
When a considerable industry is growing and challenged, it’s time for the smart and the brave to step up and for the slow to transform to fade out. The increasing demand for built structures, and the rising costs and complexities of construction as an industry and a market, will push an industry scale transformation. You don’t have to believe it; some advertisers didn’t believe it also in the late 90s. Still, the banking sector and finance industry, a significant stakeholder in the construction industry, was cautious enough not to miss the emerging opportunities of fintech. So we don’t think that the financiers of buildings will let the industry stumble into decay.
Construction innovation and, subsequently, one of their offsprings – construction tech – leaves one question open. When will they scale?
But answering these questions will not be at the discretion of the construction industry alone: As competition in the construction sector increases, clients become more sensitive to the quality of products they receive. As investors become more concerned about their investments, they will scrutinize the construction qualities. And as startups increasingly validate new tools and technologies. It seems like the construction industry is undergoing a coordinated assault of products and services that will inevitably land the awaited product-market fit’s to change the industry.
It seems that builders are already in a perfect storm; with both internal and external attention to innovations and improvements, transformation accelerates immanently. And when fast movers are already seeking means for improvements, you can bet that the fast followers are joining sooner than later.
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