Managing innovation in the construction industry

Many years of research on innovation has proved that innovation is the linchpin for the survival and growth of organisations. Moreover, scholars have spotted the importance of innovation in the construction industry. This research was an investigation into the management of innovation for the facilitation of the design and maintenance of a favourable environment in order to increase the potential of organisations to innovate. Supported by the notion of equifinality in open systems where an end state can be reached by many potential means, actions that facilitate innovation need to be organisation specific. Towards this end and being in line with the Schumpeterian perspective, this text emphasises the importance of increasing organisations‟ potential to innovate. A generic holistic model of innovation and a generic system for depicting innovation practice in organisations, both developed applying grounded theory techniques, are initially introduced. Then, they are combined together to illustrate a generic mechanism of innovation. This generic mechanism of innovation was applied using a survey within the specific context of the construction industry in the UK. The generic mechanism of innovation was systematised within a software program developed, named InnoAct. InnoAct can be used as a tool, which can be customised according to individual organisational characteristics, for evaluating and monitoring the innovation potential of organisations and for providing alternative scenarios which can facilitate the decision-making process towards increasing the potential to innovate. Finally, a procedure using Program Logic Modelling was developed for facilitating the systematic evaluation of organisational performance towards innovation. The proposed procedure can be used to provide trainers and researchers with a new perspective in the study of innovation management and alert managers and policy makers of their need to take appropriate actions to increase performance towards innovation and, in effect, increase economic growth.