Innovative construction methods

The construction industry is relatively slow in developing and adopting new technologies and usually prefers conservative, well-known practices over innovative construction methods. The paper discussus the logic and reasons behind this behaviour, while pointing to special circumstances in recent history when the balance between risk and benefits tilted towards the benefits, providing the opportunity for innovation to flourish. Such a situation occurred in Israel between 1990 and 1992, as a continuous stream of new immigrants was arriving in the country mainly from the former Soviet Union. The urgent need for mass housing, without creating the slums of the future, stimulated unique economic approaches of risk sharing in large-scale projects and gave rise to the implementation of dozens of innovative construction methods. Three of these unconventional methods are presented and analysed as representative of three larger categories: revival of methods that performed reasonably well in the past but have lapsed for mainly economic reasons, imported methods with favourable records from other countries and totally new methods with no past experience. The paper concludes with a cross-comparison of their advantages and limitations concerning various attributes and with some generalized lessons for selection criteria, which will be elaborated on in a forthcoming paper.