PhD position VIA PRUDENTI - Collaborative Infrastructure and Asset Management Practices

Society is facing major challenges like labour and material scarcity, digitalisation and climate adaptation. These challenges have a significant impact on our built environment and the actors that operate in this field. Addressing these challenges requires a fundamental change in how public organisations operate and coordinate themselves and their relations with private parties in the construction industry.

This PhD project aims to experiment with unique shared service centres to coordinate and conduct asset management and maintenance activities across infrastructure networks in the Netherlands. Together with our research partners from Next Generation Infrastructure network, the PhD candidate will be in the lead to develop organisational principles and action perspectives that help infrastructure agencies to collaboratively maintain our roads, bridges, waterways, electricity networks and railways.

As part of the larger NWO funded VIA PRUDENTI project, we will truly experiment with working towards a resilient and smart infrastructure sector by co-creating integrated service delivery solutions across infrastructure networks, studying how infrastructure administrators handle uncertainty and complexity across multiple organisational levels when managing their infrastructure assets.

The candidate will operate at the intersection of various academic disciplines (construction management, operations research, digitalisation & innovation management, purchasing & supply chain management, organizational studies) and actively engage with Dutch (semi) public infrastructure organisations and gain unique experience in different professional settings in the Netherlands. This requires a curiosity for interdisciplinary and qualitative empirical research and a sense of urgency for turning theory into practice and practice into theory in close collaboration with the research team and their partners.

• You have, or will shortly acquire, a master’s degree in the field of in construction management, operations research, civil engineering & management, innovation sciences, business administration, management studies, or a related discipline.
• Strong interest in and affinity for

(1) inter-organisational collaboration in the built environment,
(2) design science & field lab experimentation aimed at implementing digital innovations, and/or
(3) action research on strategic procurement and supply chain management issues.

• Eager to explore new empirical research directions and flexible to adapt the research process to new developments and insights.
• Comfortable at the interface of academia and practice, demonstrating effective communication and publication skills in both.
• Interested in managing networks and relations with practitioners in the field of construction and infrastructure asset management.
• You have excellent speaking and academic writing skills in English.
• You have effective operational proficiency in Dutch (minimum C1 level).

You will work in the Integrated Project Delivery (IPD) research group at the faculty of Engineering Technology (ET) of the University of Twente. The Integrated Project Delivery group envisions sustainable and resilient civil infrastructure through integrated project delivery.

To achieve this vision, the IPD research group’s mission is to contribute to innovative solutions on different levels in which socio-technical transitions take shape, ranging from sector dynamics to project practices. This asks for interdisciplinary research, in which different disciplines and fields like civil engineering, organisational sciences and design sciences are combined.

Our mission is guided by two research lines, each addressing two levels on which innovations are developed:

1. resilient infrastructure systems
2. value-based project and programme delivery of infrastructure assets.

In this project we will closely collaborate with the Tilburg School of Economics and Management of the University of Tilburg, especially in the field of Systems & Operations Management.