The Connectivity of Innovation in the Construction Industry

Malena Ingemansson Havenvid, Åse Linné, Lena E. Bygballe, Chris Harty

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351110174
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

The construction industry is currently experiencing accelerating developments concerning societal demands along with project complexity, internationalization and digitalization. In an attempt to grasp the consequences of these demands on productivity and innovation, this edited book addresses how innovation is likely to take place with a more long-term perspective on the construction sector.

While existing literature focuses on organizational discontinuity and fragmentation as the main reasons for the apparent lack of innovation in the industry, this book highlights the connectivity of construction actors, resources and activities as fundamental for understanding how innovation takes place.Through 15 empirically grounded chapters, the book shows how innovation is part of construction processes on various levels, including project, firm and industry, and that these innovation processes are characterized by organizational and technological connectivity over time.

Written by European business management scholars, the chapters cover empirical cases and examples from both a multi-organizational and a multi-international perspective in terms of covering the viewpoints of different industry actors and the contexts of several different European countries including: Sweden, Norway, the UK, Italy, France, Hungary and Poland. By illustrating how connectivity is part of innovation processes in the creation of single-product innovations, of various innovations within and across projects, as well as a fundamental aspect of the processes in which innovations cross nations, the book provides a new angle on how to understand construction innovation and where the industry might (or needs to) be heading next.

This book is essential reading for anyone interested in construction management, project management, engineering management, innovation studies, business and management studies.

1 In pursuit of a new understanding of innovation in the construction industry

The significance of connectivity

Malena Ingemansson Havenvid, Åse Linné, Lena E. Bygballe and Chris Harty

The forming of a European research network

On the 25th and 26th of April 2013, 16 academics met at BI, the Norwegian Business School in Oslo. They came from different institutions and departments across Europe and from different disciplines but with a common interest in construction innovation. They especially held in common interest in the variety of types and scales of innovation activities in the construction industry, and the connections between products, processes, resources, projects, firms, sectors and nations influencing these activities. The title of the workshop was “On How the Construction Industry Is Organised to Deal with Innovation.”

Innovation in construction is in many ways a well rehearsed area and the subject of hundreds if not thousands of conference and journal papers, books and reports. But the coming together of disciplines across built environment, organisation and management, social science and engineering was quite innovative in itself, as was, to some extent, the focus on connections over either specific instances of innovation or the development of system-level theories of innovation.

One of the anticipated outcomes from this meeting was the development of a shared methodological platform, from which researchers across Europe could undertake individual (and individually relevant) studies yet produce robust and comparable data. These would be on levels of innovation, on types and features of innovation networks, on measuring the value and success of innovation – a standardised innovation barometer if you will – to apply across European sectors. This would be a significant step forward in not only our understanding of innovation in construction but also generating real impacts on construction in supporting successful innovation activities.

This, of course, was doomed to fail. The benefits of different research traditions and interests across an interdisciplinary group – of multiple lenses held up to the same issues – bring the drawbacks of contested epistemological positions, theoretical incompatibility and irreconcilable units of analysis. Interdisciplinarity comes at the expense of homogeneity in approach.

But all was certainly not lost, and several actions emerged from this meeting, the most important being to meet again. Another was to use (and expand) the group in order to look for meaningful and coherent collaborations across disciplines, approaches and national boundaries. Yet another was to provide a peer support network on emerging publications or ideas for future research projects. So a programme of workshops every six months began, each hosted at a different institution and in a different country, some with particular themes or intentions, others as a more open forum for furthering discussions.

Since the first meeting in Oslo, ENRIC (European Network for Research on Innovation in Construction) has grown to include over 50 researchers and has been hosted by ten different universities in eight different countries. But more importantly, it has established an interdisciplinary critical mass of activity examining the ways that different parts of an international construction sector connect and interact and the implications of these connections on innovation. Indeed, over time, a number of shared principles emerged around which we, the researchers, can organise the multiple and heterogeneous research we all conduct. This edited collection is the result of the network’s endeavours to date.

The problem of innovation?

Anyone reading this introduction will no doubt be familiar with the long-standing debates over the innovativeness, or otherwise, of construction. Whether oriented around national policies and strategies for improvement, the value added by the delivery and supply chain or the adoption of techniques and technologies from elsewhere, the need to become more innovative has been a constant theme in construction sector discussions for decades, within and outside academic debate (e.g. Egan, 1998; Bröchner, 2011; Tennant and Fernie, 2014).

It is by no means a simple debate, ranging from claims of a significant lack of innovation through celebrations of various successful technological and process-based advances to criticism of the measures used to evaluate innovation being inappropriate for construction activities (Winch, 2003, 2014). Research on innovation in construction is equally extensive and heterogeneous. It is certainly the case that the topic remains contentious and contested and continues to attract interest (Walker, 2016). There is a significant body of work that identify various barriers to and challenges of innovation. Much of this rehearses well understood features of construction, such as fragmentation and specialisation, competitive tendering, improving project-to-organisation learning, site-based conditions or economic pressures (Latham, 1994; Blayse and Manley, 2004). There are also many studies that deal with single or specific types of innovations, such as new technology use, whether process technologies such as BIM (building information modelling), products such as low-carbon materials or building technologies, or new processes such as integrated project delivery/public private partnerships as innovative contract forms, LEAN construction etc. (Nam and Tatum, 1989; Baxter and Berente, 2010; Rowlinson, 2017). Alongside these are many demonstrator or proof-of-concept studies, such as those into low-carbon homes, IT use and prefabrication processes, which larger-scale implementation and exploitation are left as ‘next steps’ (Thuesen and Hvam, 2011; Shapira, Filin, Wicnudel, 2014) These are often centred on specific project-level activities. A further category would be research that seeks to explain the specificities of construction and managerial and contextual factors influencing the process of innovation such as case studies and evaluations of specific ‘real world use’ of new information technologies (Mitropolous and Tatum, 1999; Winch, 2003; Harty and Whyte, 2010; Whyte and Hartmann, 2017). So what might we add here?

One recurring argument that dominates much of the debate is that the fragmentation of the organisation of production has a negative impact on organisational learning and scaling up of successful project-specific solutions (e.g. Dubois and Gadde, 2002; Miozzo and Dewick, 2004; Harty, 2008). Large numbers of specialised firms and organisations come together for time-bound, usually one-off projects, which make learning difficult to apply elsewhere. It also refers to the types of relationships generally applied among construction-related firms and organisations; even when it is not needed, traditional tendering based on lowest price is often practiced. While this research certainly has merit in demonstrating specific types of problems that characterise the inter-organisational practices of the industry, it provides less of an understanding of the fundamental organisational processes that enable learning and innovation to take place in this sector. It might even discourage further studies of these very processes, treating them as given, something we try to address in this volume.

Recently, scholars have sought more in-depth investigation of what construction innovation actually is by drawing on multiple perspectives. One such example is the edited volume by Orstavik, Dainty and Abbot (2015). In their editorial chapter, the authors state that by placing different theoretical perspectives on construction innovation, the common view that surfaces is that of innovation as “a largely emergent, non-linear, multi-level and hence, highly complex phenomenon” and of innovation outcomes as “multidimensional” (Orstavik et al., 2015, p. 11). This suggests that there is no one simple explanation for why organisational learning and innovation appear difficult within this industry, nor is there one simple remedy. This also suggests that there is no one single approach to studying innovation in construction.

Placing the fragmentation of actors and activities at the forefront of what is “wrong” with the industry has led to a number of organisational cures for increasing the industry’s overall effectiveness and efficiency. The most prominent proposed methods of doing so are new project delivery forms (e.g. partnering), coordination tools (e.g. VDC/BIM), process thinking (LEAN), standardisation and industrialisation. However, the configuration of the industry has made implementation of these approaches challenging, and thus there appears to be a missing link in our understanding of why such attempts are not as effective in this industry as in others (Sage, Dainty and Brookes, 2012; Dainty, Leiringer, Fernie and Harty, 2017; Rowlinson, 2017).

One response is to designate construction as “a special case” in that construction innovation differs from innovation in other sectors such as manufacturing (e.g. Hobday, 2000; Gann and Salter, 2000; Winch, 2003). However, the specificities of the way construction actors and activities are organised do not mean that decades of empirical research on innovation is not of use also in this context. Rather, it means that it needs to be applied very carefully and with a meticulous understanding of those specificities. In particular, it can assist in the exploration of what innovation is in this industry.

In making such an exploration, in this book we wish to highlight the empirically based contributions of numerous prominent innovation and management scholars that emphasise the interactive nature of innovation processes in terms of being emergent (e.g. van de Ven, 1986; van de Ven, Polley, Garud and Venkataraman, 1999), taking place over long periods of time and involving different (confronting) bodies of knowledge (Utterback and Abernathy, 1975; Utterback, 1994), and therefore being more cumulative than perhaps is realised (Rosenberg, 1994). This has (earlier and later) been expressed in various ways, for instance that innovation indeed is new combinations of existing knowledge and/or technologies (e.g. Schumpeter, 1975).

This has several important implications. One is that the new arises from the old, which means that to understand how and why innovation comes about, there is a temporal and spatial context to consider. It also means that neither its origin nor its process is necessarily easy to trace, capture or “unpack”; what are the various pieces of knowledge and technology that eventually has formed into something that we identify as innovation? A second implication is that innovation appears to arise in the interfaces of different entities, be they knowledge fragments or material solutions/technologies. This implies that what will come out of attempted innovation processes is highly uncertain. It also means that innovation can be the outcome of initially unintended innovation attempts; e.g. through problem solving, different bodies of knowledge or material solutions are combined in new ways that may present innovation opportunities. Thus, innovation is unpredictable in several ways (Kline and Rosenberg, 1986; Pinch and Bijker, 1987), and it is the different paths that learning and innovation can take within construction as an innovation context that we wish to explore in this book.

Such an interactive view has also earlier been acknowledged within the construction management literature. For instance, in contesting the role of any single organisation or individual as in control of the innovation process, Harty (2008) introduced the concept of relative boundedness:

[W]hat happens if innovation’s effects or repercussions extend beyond the control or sphere of influence of the implementer – if it is relatively unbounded? In such cases, how does implementation play out? […] Considering relative boundedness avoids common assumptions that innovation always takes place within coherent and unilateral landscapes. It also brings more clearly into focus the range of pre-existing conditions and practices into which an innovation is implemented.

(Harty, 2008, p. 1032)

Thus, while acknowledging that the specificities of construction need to be considered in order to learn how and why innovation takes place, the way in which these specificities are considered, in terms of setting the temporal and spatial boundaries of innovation work, is crucial for how we are to understand construction as an innovation context.

Process-based studies of innovation in various industries, including construction, suggest that it is not a one-shot event nor can it be controlled or driven by any one actor. Thus, we propose that innovation efforts in construction (deliberate and emergent) need to be viewed across an inter-organisational landscape that includes interaction processes within and between both permanent (i.e. firms) and temporary organisations (i.e. projects) over time. In our view, this stands in contrast to the predominant approach of highlighting the fragmentation and discontinuities of the industry. Instead, in this edited volume we wish to address how innovation processes unfold in terms of the connectivity of actors, processes and resources over time. By emphasising connectivity (instead of connections) we acknowledge the dynamic nature of connections, i.e. processes of connecting and disconnecting. Thus, connectivity signifies both the present and the possibility of a different future; connections may break, transform and new ones may arise (Kolb, 2008). We believe that in-depth empirical studies with a processual, inter-project and inter-organisational angle represent an understated and needed perspective in order to grasp the underlying processes and reasons for how construction innovation evolves long term. In such a pursuit, the concept of connectivity can serve as a powerful tool to trace interrelations between process and context.

In this book, we take forward three tenets; a commitment to revealing organisational processes within contexts of innovation in construction, the need to apply multiple perspectives to empirical phenomena, and the recognition of the different temporal and spatial distributions of innovation as processual activities. We therefore identify connectivity as a phenomenon that deserves more attention in efforts of grasping the progress of an industry that is currently experiencing accelerating developments concerning project complexity, internationalisation and digitalisation. More specifically, through a number of empirically grounded chapters representing several different national contexts, various aspects of connectivity in relation to learning and innovation are addressed. The aim is placing an interactive and inter-organisational perspective on how learning and innovation processes unfold in this particular sector. This implies addressing different aspects of how construction actors, resources and processes are connected (as well as disconnected) in relation to single product innovations, policymaking processes, procurement decisions, digital tools, different contractual forms, and supply chain interfaces on project, firm, sector and international levels. This includes a multi-organisational perspective and the perspectives of various types of industry actors (e.g. suppliers, entrepreneurs, clients, end users, policymakers etc.).

In the next and final section of this introduction, we briefly introduce the separate chapters making up the book. As we will see, the chapters illustrate that the empirical scope of how connectivity can be identified and traced ranges from single case studies of projects to sector-level analyses and transnational networks. This also consciously reflects the organisation of the chapters, starting with illustrations of connectivity on the single-firm and project levels, subsequently on multiple projects involving conditions within and between countries, and lastly on sector and transnational network levels. In the concluding editorial chapter, we address the learnings from the chapters by discussing construction organisation and innovation as subjected to both boundaries and connections and the paradoxical tensions this gives rise to. From this, we generate a set of analytical questions concerning the challenges and opportunities of tracing learning and innovation processes as multidimensional phenomena across a connected and disconnected business landscape over time. Based on these challenges and opportunities, we suggest a research agenda for considering connectivity as an inherent part of organisational life in construction.

Introducing the chapter contributions

The first part of the book focuses on case studies on firm and project level and how connectivity appears in individual as well as connected projects. Chapter 2, relates to the emerging literature on innovation that shows the unfolding of socio-technical connections that condition innovation. T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 In pursuit of a new understanding of innovation in the construction industry: the significance of connectivity
• 2 Forming innovative projects in sustainable construction: how socio-technical connectivity shapes the building project and its context
• 3 The use of technology and its effect on innovation: the case of BIM in the New Karolinska Solna Hospital project
• 4 Entrepreneurial innovation in the construction sector
• 5 Construction logistics innovation: tracing connectivity from activity interdependencies
• 6 Cross-fertilization between construction and clinical actors: the dynamics of health care construction projects
• 7 Innovation among project islands: a question of handling interdependencies through bridging
• 8 Construction projects as vehicles for health care innovation?
• 9 Innovation in strategic capabilities of municipal clients: some evidence from a Swedish case study
• 10 Organising communities for construction innovation: examples from the French and Swedish construction sectors
• 11 The connectivity of domestic and international actors in product innovation: the case of Polish windows manufacturing
• 12 Narratives of innovation that address climate change agenda in the construction sector
• 13 Activity systems and innovation in project-based production: the case of construction
• 14 Tracing the connectivity of innovation in construction across time and space
• Index