Modeling the process of innovation in construction: Framework and research agenda.

Abstract

Increasing demand and expectations from clients coupled with the need to compete necessitate that Construction firms innovate to gain competitive advantage. Despite the labelling of the construction industry as less innovative by a number of reviews and comparative studies, innovation in the industry occurs at a high rate often hidden on projects. A better understanding of such innovation processes could be crucial for the management and implementation of innovations. However, current innovation literature in construction is focused on adoption and diffusion of innovations sourced from manufacturers and leading suppliers. Attempts at innovation processes have often come from generic models of how innovation occurs in construction based on theoretical speculation rather than empirical observation of the processes of specific innovations. This has resulted in a lack of understanding of the dynamics and processes by which innovation occurs in construction and an inadequate process theory for construction innovation. This paper presents a framework and agenda for exploring the trajectory of innovations in construction adapting concepts from the Minnesota innovation studies framework (MISF). The MISF suggests that the process of innovation involve five concepts: ideas, people, transactions, context, process and outcomes. The paper also draws on organizational ambidexterity theory and the intellectual capital based view, proposing a framework that is an adaptation of MISF. The proposed framework focuses on innovative ideas as being explorative or exploitative; people in terms of human capital; transactions shaped by social capital and context as organizational capital; the process as the sequence or stages of innovation generation or adoption for implementation and outcomes as the consequences of the innovation process for projects and firms. The paper draws on an ongoing research that aims to develop process theory for construction innovation, which can potentially provide a model of the innovation process in construction based on real examples of how processes of specific innovations unfold.