Construction Innovation

Simplistic and vague assumptions and sometimes outright misunderstandings on the nature of construction innovation and its implications are an obstacle to clear thinking and reasoning about the important innovation challenges facing the construction industry. This book gets to grips with the real–life complexity of construction innovation, and does this whilst avoiding simply reproducing the complexities of real–life construction innovation within the book itself. This book develops simpler and more general concepts, in order to make sense of what is the reality of construction innovation and takes a fresh look at what is actually hidden inside the broad term “construction innovation”. Rather than glossing over difficult conceptual issues, this book instead looks explicitly at the actual challenges that conceptual issues entail and seeks to open up fresh intellectual space for reflection on construction innovation. The editors intentionally coalesce a wide range of diverse perspectives on innovation in the built environment. Unlike other texts which have examined innovation from a particular theoretical standpoint, this book examines innovation from a plurality of positions and through different conceptual lenses. The book reveals the multiplicity of ways in which innovation has been conceptualised within a construction context, and what each theoretical perspective offers to our understanding of the way that the construction sector addresses the need to innovate at both project and organizational levels. Although the insights provided are necessarily grounded in particular geographical, socio–economic and cultural contexts, within this book they will be organised in relation to their theoretical provenance and contribution. The book concludes with a discussion of the principal emergent and recurrent themes which pervade the contributions and which provide fresh directions for future research in this area.