Digital Twins and Blockchain: How an Alternative Built Environment Business Model can be Enabled by Tokenisation

Abstract

Construction today is poised between a failing business model and possibly successful future ones. Using the Three Horizons approach to transformative innovation (ref 1) one can say that the first horizon, the present, is characterised by transactional approaches to procurement, cost-driven purchasing, low margins, weak productivity and innovation, poor quality and the treatment of natural, social and human capital as externalities. The second horizon consists of innovations which can improve the first one or become bridges to a third horizon of transformed approaches. Elements already visible in the second horizon include a new awareness of the outcome value of assets, rising desire and ability to embrace natural, social and human capital factors, increasing interest in collaboration and partnership, industrialisation of building production, digital information management and the addition of ‘smart’ sensors and analytics to the built asset. The Grenfell Tower disaster has also set in train a major realignment of regulation, requiring long-term asset information retention to allow safer stewardship of buildings. The digital twin concept is a third horizon idea which may result.