Dr Francis Edum-Fotwe

Previous research projects

• Strategic planning within construction companies, £40K, EPSRC, 1998, 12 months
• MERIT 3 Management Training by Simulation for Construction Industry, £61K funding and £49K in-kind contribution, DETR and Industry Consortium, 1998, 15 months
• Annual Performance Benchmarking, 1998, £38K, Industry Consortium
• Annual Performance Benchmarking, 1999, £50K, Industry Consortium
• GENIAL 1997-1998, ECU40K, Taylor Woodrow, ESPRIT, and GEN Consortium
• Component and process standardisation, 2000, £61K, NHS Estates
• Training needs of high-growth engineering SMEs in East Midlands, 2001, £10.5K, EMDA
• Future developments in Distributed Design Teams, 2001, £242K, Academic consortium, Industry Consortium, EPSRC-IMRC
• Potential areas of application for rapid manufacture in the construction sector, 2004, IMCRC Strategic funding, Academic and industry partnership, £60K
• Sustainable Urban Environment-Metrics, Models & Toolkits - Transition project, 2005, EPSRC £125K, Academic and Industry consortia
• ProfPM- Improving project management practice in Greece, 2006, €4K, General Secretariat for Research and Development, Greece
• Innovation, technology and knowledge flows in the construction industry, 2007, €23K, KNAW MNB, The Netherlands
• Royal Society Travel Grant for Investigating constraints in Engineering Management Research in Ghana, 2008, £4.5K

Alotaibi, A, Edum-Fotwe, F, Price, ADF (2019) Identification of social responsibility factors within mega construction projects, International Journal of Engineering Management and Economics, 13(1).

Talabi, BO, Edum-Fotwe, F, Gibb, A (2019) Personal attributes of supervisors: are these the key to transforming construction safety in the UK?, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers - Management, Procurement and Law, 172(3), pp.1-15, ISSN: 1751-4304. DOI: 10.1680/jmapl.18.00028.

Alotaibi, A, Edum-Fotwe, FT, Price, A (2019) Critical barriers to social responsibility implementation within mega-construction projects: The case of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Sustainability, 11(6), DOI: 10.3390/su11061755.

Pala, M, Edum-Fotwe, FT, Ruikar, K, Doughty, N, Peters, C (2019) Post-implementation analysis of a B2B e-marketplace, ITcon, 24, pp.129-153, ISSN: 1874-4753.

Pantzartzis, E, Price, A, Edum-Fotwe, FT (2019) Roadmap layers and processes: resilient and sustainable care facilities, Engineering, Construction and Architectural Management, 26(9), pp.1986-2007, ISSN: 1365-232X. DOI: 10.1108/ECAM-06-2016-0136.

Academic visits:

• Department of Civil Engineering, National technical University of Athens, Greece
• University of Applied Sciences, Bremen, Germany
• Department of Technology management, Technical University, Eindhoven, The Netherlands
• Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, UNZA, Zambia
• University of the Aegean, Greece

I was appointed to a post-doctoral position in construction and project management as a Research Associate in 1996 and subsequently as a Research Fellow in 1998. The position was a natural follow-on to the area of investigation for my PhD studies conducted on the Strategic Management Practices of Construction Companies, and resulting in a thesis titled A Framework for Improving the Strategic Management of Construction Contractors. The key recommendations from the thesis provided the basis for an EPSRC funded project on strategic management in construction. It also led to the development of a teaching module to address the shortcomings of strategic management practice in construction, which has become an integral part of the postgraduate programmes in Construction Management and Construction Project Management offered by the Department of Civil and Building Engineering at Loughborough University.

From 1996 to 2005, I worked in various capacities on several projects. Among these projects is the European Construction Institutes' (ECI) Strategic Directions for the ECI, and Performance and Process Benchmarking Initiative. The Benchmarking programme involved extensive co-operation with the Construction Industry Institute (CII) in Austin Texas, to develop performance metrics and norms for major engineering and construction projects. Other projects managed during this period include MERIT funded by the DETR and industry consortium, GENIAL funded by the EU and industry consortium, Component and Process Standardisation funded by the NHS Estates, Training needs of high-growth engineering SMEs in East Midlands funded by East Midlands Development Agency, Telegenesis funded by the EPSRC, and SUEMoT funded by the EPSRC.

The Telegenesis project culminated in a foresight report on Design Futures across different disciplines. I was subsequently invited to participate in CIRIA's Lively Minds Club, a think-tank set up to develop construction futures for the UK, as a result of my work on the Telegenesis project. The SUEMoT project reflects a growing trend, which transcends construction, to account for the full cost of economic activities performed by the private and public sectors. The SUEMoT project explored and identified several tools that can be employed specifically for assessing the impact of projects on various aspects of sustainability for the built urban environment.

In 2005, I was appointed as a lecturer in construction and project management. Since taking up the position I have been involved in the development of the main programme of the SUEMoT project, which is part of a larger EPSRC managed programme on Sustainable Urban Environments (SUE). My particular interest on the SUEMoT project has been in the area of modelling objective and subjective decision variables to produce a single sustainability assessment for the built environment.