The con­struc­tion indus­try, and small and medi­um-sized enter­pris­es (SMEs) in par­tic­u­lar, are faced with the chal­lenge of effec­tive­ly inte­grat­ing dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies and mod­ern coop­er­a­tion mod­els into their day-to-day work. Many SMEs have so far made only lim­it­ed use of dig­i­tal tools and have found it dif­fi­cult to iden­ti­fy and imple­ment suit­able tech­nolo­gies for their oper­a­tions. In addi­tion, there is a lack of spe­cif­ic train­ing pro­grammes that pro­vide employ­ees and man­agers with the nec­es­sary dig­i­tal skills.

This is where our best-prac­tice approach comes in: we have iden­ti­fied, analysed and pre­pared suc­cess­ful­ly applied dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies and train­ing pro­grammes for SMEs in the con­struc­tion and fin­ish­ing trade in 13 coun­tries. These best prac­tices show how SMEs can exploit inno­va­tion poten­tial, increase their effi­cien­cy and enhance their com­pet­i­tive­ness by using dig­i­tal solu­tions. A par­tic­u­lar focus is on dig­i­tal col­lab­o­ra­tion – an area in which many SMEs still have some catch­ing up to do.

The aim is to imple­ment these field-test­ed approach­es on a broad basis. Teach­ers, con­sul­tants and edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions receive the nec­es­sary knowl­edge and tools from the pre­pared best prac­tices to train and sup­port SMEs in a tar­get­ed man­ner. In this way, edu­ca­tion­al insti­tu­tions can also make a long-term con­tri­bu­tion to pro­mot­ing dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion in the con­struc­tion indus­try and help SMEs to suc­cess­ful­ly inte­grate dig­i­tal tech­nolo­gies into their every­day lives.

These best prac­tices form the basis for fur­ther edu­ca­tion­al pro­grammes that are specif­i­cal­ly tai­lored to the needs of SMEs, enabling them to suc­cess­ful­ly mas­ter the dig­i­tal trans­for­ma­tion.