Construction Innovation

Finn Orstavik, Andrew R. J. Dainty, Carl Abbott, Finn Orstavik, Andrew R. J. Dainty, Carl Abbott

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781118655535
• eBook ISBN: 9781118655559
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Construction & Architectural Engineering
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Construction innovation is an important but contested concept, both in industry practice and academic reflection and research. A fundamental reason for this is the nature of the construction industry itself: the industry and the value creation activities taking place there are multi-disciplinary, heterogeneous, distributed and often fragmented.

This book takes a new approach to construction innovation, revealing different perspectives, set in a broader context. It coalesces multiple theoretical and practice-based views in order to stimulate reflection and to prepare the ground for further synthesis. By being clear, cogent and unambiguous on the most basic definitions, it can mobilise a plurality of perspectives on innovation to promote fresh thinking on how it can be studied, enabled, measured, and propagated across the industry.

This book does not gloss over the real-life complexity of construction innovation. Instead, its authors look explicitly at the challenges that conceptual issues entail and by making their own position clear, they open up fresh intellectual space for reflection.

Construction Innovation examines innovation from different positions and through different conceptual lenses to reveal the richness that the theoretical perspectives offer to our understanding of the way that the construction sector actors innovate at both project and organizational levels.

The editors have brought together here leading scholars to deconstruct the concept of innovation and to discuss the merits of different perspectives, their commonalities and their diversity. The result is an invaluable sourcebook for those studying and leading innovation in the design, the building and the maintenance of our built environment.

1
Introduction

Finn Orstavik, Andrew Dainty and Carl Abbott

Historically, two very different and yet inseparable impulses have shaped modern business: a quest for more efficient production and the pursuit of competitive advantage through novelty and innovation. Production is typically carried out in enterprises whose survival depends on offering goods and services for which alternatives may be available from a range of competing suppliers. To survive and flourish under such circumstances, enterprises have to make efforts, for example, to reduce prices (by avoiding waste and increasing productivity) and/or to create novel value propositions (by innovating). Although these fundamental agendas are certainly not mutually exclusive, embracing innovation encompasses much more than addressing production and distribution inefficiencies. In his early theory on economic development, the Austrian-American economist Joseph A. Schumpeter suggests that what really counts is the competition from new commodities, new technology, new sources of supply, and new types of organization (Schumpeter 1983). Unlike gradual efficiency improvements, he reiterates in a later work, that innovation ‘strikes not at the margins of the profits and the outputs of the existing firms but at their foundations and their very lives’. If price competition is comparable to forcing a door, then innovation is more like bombardment, he proclaims (Schumpeter 1976).

However, to succeed in realizing innovations is difficult, ‘first, because they lie outside of the routine tasks which everybody understands’ and ‘secondly, because the environment resists in many ways that vary, according to social conditions, from simple refusal either to finance or to buy a new thing, to physical attack on the man who tries to produce it’ (Schumpeter 1976). Even though Schumpeter saw that innovation-based competition was becoming institutionalised as ‘technological progress is increasingly becoming the business of teams of trained specialists who turn out what is required and make it work in predictable ways’, he still maintained that the resistance to innovation based on economic interests vested in the established order would never go away (Schumpeter 1976). Accordingly, when considering construction and the production of the built environment in modern societies, he in the same text noted that vested interests and the weight of tradition in a very significant way stifled innovation, representing ‘the great obstacle on the road toward mass production of cheap housing which presupposes radical mechanization and wholesale elimination of inefficient methods of work on the plot’.

As pointed out by Loosemore in Chapter 5 in this volume, a simple linear model of innovation has often dominated thinking about construction innovation in public policy, in academic institutions and in industry organizations and firms. In this linear model, results from scientific research and technological development are supposed to feed into commercial activities and drive industrial development and growth (Stokes 1997). This model of innovation is seen by many as inextricably linked to Schumpeter’s theories and his notion of the entrepreneurial function in capitalist economies (Pavitt 2005). Arguably, this model forms a set of implicit premises when it is contended that the construction industry has a troubled record of innovation for growth and competiveness. This is a recurring theme in the literature on construction. The problem is seen as a lack of willingness to adopt novel results from scientific research and technological development, and even more generally, an inability or unwillingness to learn (e.g. Egan 1998; Lepatner 2007).

Several recent contributions have, however, problematized this view and have pointed out the importance of recognising the varied nature and effects of innovation. For example, in their comprehensive work on the management of innovation, Tidd and Bessant (2013) espouse a process view of innovation, one of ‘turning ideas into reality and capturing value from them’ (p. 21). They see innovation as far more than the generation of new ideas. Innovation also encompasses the need to carefully select the ideas with potential, to implement them and to capture value from them. Process-oriented research on innovation, such as documented in contributions by Van de Ven et al. (1989, 1999), also shows that innovation does not follow linear pathways and is generally marked by ambiguity and discontinuity. Innovation is often very costly in part because organizations have to reframe their approach to reflect the new circumstances that result from the innovation efforts themselves. Beyond this, innovators and those affected by innovation will also learn to anticipate effects. Hence, reflexivity enters into innovation processes, which means that actions and decisions can be understood only contextually and in a temporal framework. All this serves to emphasise the need to consider innovation as a complex phenomenon and to develop alternatives to the simple linear model that has dominated much of the innovation discourse. Much remains before innovation in construction is adequately understood, and so different standpoints and models should be explored in research.

Construction Innovation: Concepts and Controversies

The doubts found in some of the research literature regarding the validity of the broad generalization that construction sector stakeholders are reluctant to innovate and to learn new and efficient ways of building (Winch 2003; Abbott et al. 2007; Whyte and Sexton 2011) does not overshadow the overall impression created by industry experts and policy-makers that it is the culture and/or the structural composition of the industry that explains its reluctance to innovate. This perception is compounded by the sector lagging behind other sectors when measured against traditional innovation metrics (NESTA 2007) and commentaries on innovation found within sector reform reports. The most recent UK report – the Industrial Strategy for Construction (BIS 2013) – suggests that around two-thirds of construction contracting companies fail to innovate. Indeed, aspects of the production of the built environment have been referred to as ‘backwards’ (Woudhuysen and Abley 2004) and parts of it even as ‘degenerate’ (Silber 2007). It may be that since Schumpeter himself made known his views on the challenges of innovation in the construction and building sector, a suspicion has lingered that the industry is in the grips of particular stakeholder interests that uphold the status quo at the expense of the industry as a whole and of society. It would seem, therefore, that significant challenges remain in terms industrial organization and innovation (Manseau and Seaden 2001).

Signs of insufficient performance in the construction sector are not hard to find, with quality and safety problems, numerous bankruptcies and projects often running late and over budget (Flyvebjerg, Bruzelius, and Rothengatter 2003; Williams 2005). Similarly, there are examples of practices that endure virtually unchanged over years in spite of obvious issues with quality and performance and of indications that compliance with minimum quality requirements in building codes is routinely treated as ‘best practice’ by constructors (Orstavik 2014; see also Chapter 6 in the present volume). Still, novel materials, new business models and new ways of designing built objects are emerging, demonstrating that much creative problem solving and local innovation is actually going on in the sector. Also, tangible results of much creative work remains hidden inside projects and fails to translate across other projects and diffuse more widely (Dubois and Gadde 2002; Abbott et al. 2007). As has been pointed out by Slaughter (1993, 1998, 2000), successful innovation requires a deeper consideration of the social and organizational contexts in which it is located. Such complexity renders the evaluation and quantification of innovation in construction difficult, so traditional metrics such as research and development (R&D) expenditure and patent rates are arguably poor proxies for the actuality of innovation in the sector. Also work by both NESTA (Halkett 2007) and Barrett et al. (2007) has suggested that innovations in service provision or microlevel project innovations developed through interactions between construction companies, consultants and clients are often not picked up by others. What emerges here, again, is a highly complex and contested arena both for defining innovation and for establishing appropriate metrics, and one that demands a plurality of different perspectives if it is to be understood within the multiple and diverse contexts that make up the construction sector.

Perspectives on Construction Innovation

In trying to open up a more pluralistic perspective on construction innovation, we have sought to include in this volume contributions that mobilise theoretical frameworks as structuring devices or as lenses necessary to bring forth productive interaction and reflection between differing positions. The point here is that we have sought to avoid privileging any particular position over others, instead making clear that concepts can be understood differently. This being said, there are some important points of departure that underpin the contributions of this text. First, we contend, much as Schumpeter did in his early theory, that innovation should be considered more than a purely economic phenomenon. Second, an essential feature of innovation is that it is maintained through dynamic value creation efforts. In fact, innovation can be defined as humanly created changes in established approaches to value creation. We prefer using the term value creation rather than production, to avoid narrow interpretations of this term. However, the term value creation will often be synonymous with the term production in discussions and theories about innovation. A third underpinning consideration is that value creation invariably concerns human work, combining diverse elements into ‘new combinations’. These are not necessarily ‘things’ in the sense of tangible objects but anything that human beings care to combine into entities because they think these have value of some kind. ‘New combinations’ is, of course, a term also used by Schumpeter, and we agree with Drejer (2004) that there is nothing in Schumpeter’s theories that reduces innovation solely to concerning physical objects or processes related to producing such objects. Thus, innovation is in this volume seen as humanly created changes in established ways of creating value, whatever it is that is made and whatever this value consists of. What is created and consumed does not need to be material, but if we are to speak about innovation, change has to be effected in the way value is created, and this change must be seen by particular stakeholders as meaningful. And it must in some way be lasting (or sticky) because creating a novelty (for instance a technical invention or a novel architectural design for one building) that does not enter into a practice, is not used in other contexts and does not in any way diffuse cannot in itself be innovation. This follows from our definition of innovation itself because it identifies innovation as changes in established ways of value creation. Both the ‘established ways’ and the ‘novel ways’ resulting from innovation are institutionalized and, hence, to some extent lasting (Orstavik 2014). However, and as a matter of course, the timespans for which innovations are actually relevant will vary to a great deal.

Elements of these underpinning characteristics can be traced throughout the contributions contained within this volume and in the way the chapters are organized. Each chapter is intended to provide a different viewpoint on innovation in the built environment and to challenge some conventional way of thinking about construction innovation. Among the most widely diffused common-sense assumptions about innovation is that it is profitable and that the fundamental driving force for innovation is the economic gains that innovation brings. In Chapter 2 on incentives for innovation, Finn Orstavik challenges such assumptions. He argues on the basis of Schumpeter’s perspective on innovation that even though innovation is a decisive factor in competition between firms, innovation is much more than an economic phenomenon for these firms. Actually, innovation is the outcome of actions and decisions that are of a different kind than those recognized as economic and rational. In fact, the gains from innovation are highly uncertain; therefore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• About the Authors
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Incentives for Innovation in Construction
• 3 Built-in Innovation and the Ambiguity of Designing Accessibility
• 4 Stakeholder Integration Champions and Innovation in the Built Environment
• 5 Grassroots Innovation in the Construction Industry
• 6 Regulation and Innovation in New Build Housing
• 7 An Industrial Network Perspective on Innovation in Construction
• 8 Innovation Diffusion Across Firms
• 9 Clients Shaping Construction Innovation
• 10 Innovation in Road Building
• 11 Innovating for Integration: Clients as Drivers of Industry Improvement
• 12 Project Delivery Systems and Innovation: The Case of US Road Building
• 13 The Leitmotif of Building-Products Innovation in Finland
• Advertisements
• Index
• End User License Agreement