ABSTRACT

At the heart of a nation’s AEC sector is the desire to improve the value delivered to clients, users and society. Innovations in both product and process are seen as the key to implementing change and improving our built environment. It is the ability to change and revise our (possibly outdated) ideas and practices that lies at the heart of process and product improvements. The large body of literature on diffusion of innovations (Rogers, 2003) has clearly demonstrated that the adoption of innovations – new ideas, practices and products – is not a given. The vast majority of innovations fail to gain a foothold, unable to dislodge established practices, or often take a long time to diffuse into widespread use. The reasons for the poor rate of uptake relate to the perceived advantages of the innovation compared with the established methods and also to the structure of the social system, be it an individual organisation or an entire discipline. As intimated throughout this book, the social structure of the TPO is dynamic and assembled from many different organisations, each with its own disposition toward innovations, thus it is unlikely that innovations will be adopted at a project level. Rather, the innovations tend to be adopted by one or more of the influential contributors and then applied to a project, with the result that the other contributors have little option but to adopt also.