A Novel Performance Measurement of Innovation and R&D Projects for Driving Digital Transformation in Construction Using Ordinal Priority Approach

“The COVID-19 pandemic” and “digital transformation” are prevailing mega-trends of volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. Pandemic made organizations to employ strategies for “surviving, resilience, and thriving” for different periods. Digital transformation motivates organizations to grasp disruptive opportunities by conducting innovation, R&D projects. This study addresses “Which innovation and R&D projects can drive digital transformation in a construction organization, and meet its organizational criteria for survival, resilience, and thriving?” The significant issue with evaluating R&D projects is the lack of “quantitative data.” The current study proposes a novel performance measurement framework based on the Ordinal Priority Approach (OPA), which considers decision-makers’ preferences as “ordinal data.” The proposed model considers various degrees of importance for periods during performance measurement, handles any number of criteria and decision-making units (DMUs), while Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) has some limitations regarding the number of DMUs compared to the number of criteria, Moreover, proposed OPA-based framework receives positive and negative criteria without the need of transforming the data. Comparing OPA and Ordinal Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) through a pilot experiment shows that the OPA-based framework is straightforward to use, with more reliable outputs.