Australia needs a national evaluation process to assess new construction systems against measurable criteria such as productivity, environmental performance, digital integration and scalability writes Jose Atwell.
Recent commentary in The Fifth Estate highlights a widely recognised truth: the construction industry continues to struggle with declining productivity, fragmented supply chains and slow adoption of digital tools.
Most professionals in construction would agree with this diagnosis and the problem has been well documented for decades.
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Reports from governments, industry bodies and research institutions have also consistently pointed to the same issues: analogue processes, poor data integration, low R&D investment and limited adoption of modern digital systems.
The article rightly notes that technologies such as BIM, digital twins and AI-enabled analytics hold enormous potential to improve performance across the sector but there is a deeper question that rarely receives attention.
If construction truly requires a fundamental shift in how buildings are designed and delivered, who is responsible for discovering and validating that shift?
Construction is one of the largest industries in the economy, yet it is also one of the most fragmented.
Over 95 per cent of firms are small or medium enterprises. Developers focus on delivering projects, contractors focus on managing risk, and suppliers focus on their own specialised products.
Universities conduct valuable research, but their work rarely extends to building full industry systems. Governments set policy, but they typically rely on industry to develop solutions.
In other words, everyone recognises the productivity challenge, but no single institution is responsible for identifying the next construction system that might solve it.
Developing a genuinely new construction system is not a small undertaking. It requires a combination of engineering knowledge, manufacturing logic, construction experience, digital systems thinking and economic understanding.
It also requires years of experimentation, iteration and investment before the concept can be demonstrated at scale.
Most companies simply cannot sustain that level of research indefinitely without clear commercial returns. As a result, promising ideas often disappear long before they are properly evaluated.
This raises an important question for Australia.
If someone genuinely believed they had discovered a construction method capable of significantly improving productivity, sustainability and affordability, where would they take it?
Who would have the authority, expertise and independence to assess whether such a system has merit?
At present there is no clear pathway.
Innovation in construction is often discussed in terms of individual technologies – better software, improved materials or more advanced project management tools.
While these developments are valuable, they may not address the deeper structural challenge.
Productivity gains of the magnitude required may ultimately depend on changes to the underlying building system itself.
If that is the case, the industry may benefit from establishing a clearer evaluation pathway for system-level innovation.
We need a national framework
One possible approach could be the creation of a national framework for assessing new construction systems.
Such a framework could evaluate proposals against measurable criteria, including productivity improvement, environmental performance, cost efficiency, labour accessibility, digital integration and scalability.
Rather than relying on isolated trials or individual commercial risk, promising systems could be assessed through a structured process involving developers, builders, engineers, financiers and policymakers.
The aim would not be to promote any single idea, but to ensure that potentially transformative innovations are not overlooked simply because there is no corridor for them to enter the conversation.
Australia has the talent, engineering capability and entrepreneurial spirit to lead the next era of construction.
A national framework could evaluate proposals against measurable criteria, including productivity improvement, environmental performance, cost efficiency, labour accessibility, digital integration and scalability.
If the right pathway existed, there is every reason to believe that this country could become a global leader in productivity-driven, digitally integrated building systems.
But breakthroughs of this magnitude rarely appear by accident.
History shows that major advances in any industry occur when three things align: the right ideas, the right people and the right institutional pathways capable of recognising and testing those ideas.
Construction currently has the conversation.
It has the reports, the committees and the policy discussions.
Construction, despite its enormous economic importance, still relies largely on fragmented experimentation.
What it does not yet clearly have is the corridor through which a breakthrough system can be discovered, assessed and supported.
Without such a pathway, even promising innovations may struggle to move beyond isolated experiments. Companies cannot continue investing indefinitely without a framework that allows their ideas to be properly evaluated.
In other industries, structured mechanisms exist to identify transformative ideas. Aerospace, defence, medicine and energy all have pathways for evaluating breakthrough technologies.
Construction, despite its enormous economic importance, still relies largely on fragmented experimentation.
If Australia wishes to solve the long-standing productivity challenge in construction, the industry may need to consider creating a clearer road for system-level innovation.
A structured national evaluation process – involving developers, builders, engineers, investors and government – could assess new construction systems against measurable criteria such as productivity, environmental performance, digital integration and scalability.
The goal would not be to promote any particular solution.
Rather, it would ensure that if a genuine breakthrough exists, the industry has a way to recognise it.
Because the real question facing construction today is not simply how to digitalise existing methods.
The real question is this:
If someone had discovered a fundamentally better way to build, would our industry currently have a path capable of finding it?
Until that question is answered, the conversation about productivity may continue — but the breakthrough itself may remain just out of reach.