Towards Defining Categories of Innovativeness for the Construction Industry

Innovation is a necessary part of construction business operations as a means to remain competitive in a dynamic environment, and yet, as a whole the construction industry continues to be labeled as laggard. Innovation and the processes surrounding innovation involve layers of complexity and are therefore often misunderstood. In order for industry stakeholders to better derive benefits from the innovation process, they must first understand the drivers of innovation within their own organizations, including relationships to other organizations and actions of contributing individuals. Utilizing a flexible design methodology of literature review, a modified Delphi technique and a survey instrument, this work aims to develop and present an initial validation of a framework of individual and organizational change by which such characteristics of innovativeness can be categorized. As a basis of this work, categories of innovativeness are those defined by Rogers (2003), and then expanded by parameters of innovativeness extracted from scholarly literature. The overarching goal of this research endeavor is to better understand the behavior of individual and organizational change through specific categories of innovativeness that can be used to build a tangible set of tools for use in the construction industry. However, ultimate validation and translation will be the effort of future work. In gaining innovativeness knowledge, industry stakeholders will understand their own strengths and weaknesses, better arming them with the tools to initiate and succeed at organizational change.