The COVID-19 crisis highly demonstrated the weakness of European companies and principally of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to adopt both novel processes and technologies to meet new customer expectations, and to gain or improve skills to confront with the new business conditions.

More specifically, with regard to the construction industry, the emergence of COVID-19 pandemic emphasized the importance of issues that have been dogging the domain for years.

Indeed, stagnant productivity, low levels of digitization, low profitability as well as the domain highly bespoke building approach, fragmented ecosystem, and high share of on-site manual labour have signalled disruption over the last years.

Furthermore, a combination of increasingly stringent sustainability requirements, rising cost pressure, labour scarcity, and new available materials, production approaches, and digital tools are forcing the industry to innovate.