Systemic innovation in construction: The case of a Danish state development program

This paper offers an evaluation of a best practice program called 'Best in Construction' (BiC) which aimed to identify and document cases of successful ICT use in the Danish construction industry. The program is evaluated using two different approaches. The first approach is result-based. This approach evaluates the outcome of the program against the main intentions formulated in the tender material. Drawing on systemic innovation theory an alternative evaluative approach is suggested which focuses on the build-up of organizational and institutional resources to support the development of an emerging ICT trajectory. While the result-based evaluation points to some weaknesses in the quality of the best-practice and cross-organizational elements of the case-material, the systemic approach point to some important side-effects of the program, such as the stabilization and enrolment of the industry-network which carried out the programme. This stabilization and enrolment may turn out to be beneficial in the further effort to promote the ICT use and development of procedures and classifications. It is furthermore found that the problems encountered in the case-study process had a positive impact on the enrolment process of the industry-network.