The construction industry has dynamic supply chains with multiple suppliers usually engaged in short-term relationships. Government legislation, novel types of payment agreements, conventional information technology solutions, and supply chain management best practices have endeavoured to solve payment-related financial issues in the construction industry, which are mainly caused by the complexities of the construction supply chain. Nevertheless, payment-related issues persist as one of the key challenges in the industry. Applications of blockchain technology–a trusted, distributed data storing mechanism–along with smart contracts are gaining focus as solutions for complex interorganisational processes. A smart contract is a self-executing script that codifies a set of rules or agreements between multiple parties and runs across the blockchain network. This paper identifies the suitability of blockchain and smart contract technologies in solving payment issues in the construction industry. An expert forum of construction industry stakeholders served as the primary data collection method through a structured questionnaire. The key finding of the paper is that blockchain and smart contract powered solutions can significantly mitigate the payment and related financial issues in the construction industry, including partial payments, nonpayments, cost of finance, long payment cycle, retention, and security of payments.

Carbon emissions are categorised as Embodied Carbon (EC) occurring in the production phase and Operational Carbon (OC) occurring in the operational phase of buildings. The current focus on producing zero-carbon buildings, emphasises reducing OC and ignores the importance of reducing EC emissions. This study focuses on EC. Methods available in EC estimating currently produce estimates that often do not complement each other. This makes it important to develop a robust and accurate methodology for estimating EC. Blockchain is an emerging technology that has significant potential for transaction processing in supply chains. The construction industry being the second least digitalised industry, the adoption of innovative technologies is predominantly important. This paper explores the potential application of blockchain for accurate estimation of EC in construction supply chains. A detailed literature review and expert interviews revealed that, compared to traditional information systems, blockchain systems could eliminate issues in EC estimating highlighting its potential credible application for EC estimating. Scalability was identified as a feature that was lacking in a blockchain system, however, for EC estimating, its impact was identified as minimal. It will be difficult to generalise the findings of the study due to interview based qualitative methodology adopted in this study along with the fact that blockchain is an emerging and fairly new technology. However, a similar process could be followed by other studies to compare blockchain with traditional information systems, to evaluate the suitability of blockchain technology to develop prototype systems.

In the information age, organization theories have addressed problem‐solving as an information‐processing activity. However, in this era, with the realization of knowledge‐based views of the organization, shared problem‐solving is increasingly recognized as a knowledge creation trigger. During shared problem‐solving, stakeholders bring different types of knowledge into the problem situation and it is captured, created and shared by the team members. In construction projects, shared problem‐solving often takes place through pragmatic problem‐solving on site, in particular, through managing project changes. However, this significant role of knowledge in managing project change is not well appreciated in the extant literature. Accordingly, to explore how knowledge is created during project changes in construction a case study approach was adopted using two change events in two collaborative settings within the UK construction industry. The case study findings revealed that different forms of knowledge are created during the project change process within construction projects. However, this knowledge remains largely tacit and does not disseminate to the wider organization due to imbalanced codification and personalization strategies existing in such settings. A knowledge management perspective is introduced to manage project change so that construction project teams can successfully resolve and learn from change events.