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The goal of this paper is to identify the main factors driving or hindering construction innovation. An analysis of the relevant literature indicates there are six primary influences: (1) clients and manufacturers; (2) the structure of production; (3) relationships between individuals and firms within the industry and between the industry and external parties; (4) procurement systems; (5) regulations/standards; and (6) the nature and quality of organizational resources. Attention to these factors by businesses and public policy makers would be a key component of effective innovation strategy and policy. Further research is needed, however, to explore the relationships between innovation influences, and between innovation influences and other aspects of business strategy and environment, in the context of broader societal considerations. Further research should also identify quantitative estimates of the impact of innovation on the construction industry.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the role played by manufacturers of patented products on construction projects.

Four projects are reviewed to investigate the research question “How can manufacturers ensure the successful implementation of their product innovations on construction projects?”

Using a framework comprising six key innovation determinants, case‐study analysis demonstrates the critical role played by relationships and knowledge‐flows in creating conditions that support project‐based innovation by manufacturers. Such conditions comprise: advanced procurement systems, robust internal firm competencies, performance‐based regulations, effective technical support providers, and project‐imbedded manufacturers.

The study was designed to meet industry needs and hence does not emphasise theoretical aspects.

Manufacturers can improve the diffusion of their product innovations on construction projects by using relationship networks to promote the above conditions, or to locate contexts where such conditions prevail, or to leverage those conditions that are most favourable.

The paper addresses four gaps in the construction management literature: there is very little literature on the role of manufacturers in innovation on construction projects; the literature on subcontractors tends to assume easily substitutable supplies; there is a focus in the literature on large projects, and the literature is dominated by quantitative studies. By undertaking a qualitative analysis of manufacturers of patented products subcontracting to small projects, this paper addresses the above shortcomings.

Researchers have shown increased interest in open innovation – that is, the inflow and outflow of ideas, or the collaborative efforts of innovating – while previous research on acquisitions of innovative firms has foremost focused on the inflow only. Open innovation, however, introduces several new challenges related to acquisitions of such firms, not the least related to intellectual property rights and innovative skills that may be distributed among several parties. This paper explores what issues the literature on open innovation and acquisitions deals with related to acquisitions in open innovation environments.

A systematic literature review is conducted to achieve the purpose of the paper. Two main questions are addressed. First, how can acquisitions be understood in relation to open innovation? Second, what does the open innovation literature say on matters of distributed innovations in relation to acquisitions?

The paper concludes that there is a quite limited amount of research concerning itself with open innovation and acquisitions combined. Furthermore, acquisitions are for the most part seen as a means to reach innovation in transaction-based transfers between parties.

With acquisitions of innovative firms, in general, being seen as an important means to reach new ideas, while open innovation is on the rise, the juxtaposing of these phenomena would be of high practical and theoretical relevance to study further.

Decision making and the nature of decisions themselves are changing with the introduction of new information technology (IT)‐based systems in the construction industry. The use of IT systems relates to and can induce changes in business processes within firms as well as interorganizational project processes between firms. In the USA, some of the world's largest hardware and software producers are developing new generations of systems. The market for such systems is potentially large, and these vendors work in close proximity to powerful engineering and construction organizations as well as leading research establishments. It is likely that some of these systems will become de facto standards. For this and other reasons of industrial competitiveness, developments in US IT decision support systems are of interest to practitioners and researchers around the world. The present paper presents the findings of a UK Department of Trade and Industry Expert Mission to assess the development and use of IT systems in the US construction industry. The mission team included seven members, each with specialist knowledge of different aspects of IT development and implementation. The team visited 18 leading organizations where detailed interviews and seminars were conducted during a 2‐week period. The present paper highlights questions for researchers and systems developers. The main findings indicate fundamental changes to the timing, sequence and hierarchy of decision making.

This paper identifies the theoretical stimulants and impediments associated with the implementation of PFI/PPP (Private Finance Initiative/Public Private Partnership)projects. A current defect of this procurement approach is the unintentional constraint upon the innovations incorporated into the development of PFI projects. A critical evaluation of the published literature has been utilized to synthesize a theoretical model. The paper proposes a theoretical model for the identification of potential innovation stimulants and impediments within this type of procurement. This theoretical model is then utilised to evaluate four previously completed PFI projects. These project case‐studies have been examined in detail. The evaluation demonstrates how ineffective current procedures are. The application of this model before project letting could eliminate unintentional constraints and stimulate improved innovation within the process.The implementation of the model could improve the successful delivery of innovation within the entire PFI/PPP procurement process.

This chapter asks how we can understand the managerial practices in open innovation, a recently popularized way of organizing innovative work. Open innovation implies opening up the borders of the organization, creating a context where conventional steering and managerial tools no longer apply. Utilizing a collaborative research approach, following an open innovation collaboration over 8 years, this chapter outlines the managerial practices that direct the collaboration. These practices are important for meaning making and identity creation in the collaboration and can be understood as a form of authorship, a continuous intervention strategy to manage, develop and change the organizational context.

This article presents four basic innovation leadership styles: charismatic, instrumental, strategic and interactive innovation leadership. The leadership styles and their characteristsics relate to process and product innovations in construction projects. A theoretical framework – which synthesizes these relations – enables explorative research into the effects of leadership on organizational innovativeness. Four case studies, observing the same manager in four comparable projects, explore the effects of each leadership style on a construction project’s innovativeness in ecological terms. On an analytical level the case study explorations indicate that a manager’s consistent performance of a leadership style stimulates the project’s ecological innovativeness when the manager also injects the project with ecological information, knowledge and competence. It also indicates that a manager’s consistent performance of a leadership style, without an injection of information, knowledge and competence in the project, does not stimulate the project’s ecological innovativeness.

The dream of better relationships among different supply chain partners; trust and transparency during different construction activities; integrated supply chain; completion of projects on time, within the agreed cost, with promised quality products and services, and so on, have now been achieved within the UK construction industry due to innovation within the project procurement processes and activities. There has also been a growing realisation that the promotion of innovative thinking, in procurement processes for supply chain integration, offers all the involved parties some key benefits in terms of more flexibility and adaptability, commercial growth, and improved quality of products, and delivered service. This paper highlights the benefits of, and the motivation towards innovative procurement through two case studies done as part of a supply chain integration project at the SCRI research centre. The case studies demonstrate how organizations involved have promoted innovative thinking across the supply chain through innovative procurement. The case studies also highlight some of the critical factors that motivated people within those firms to move from traditional way of procurement, and search, innovate, and implement the new procurement thoughts and models. The paper concludes that these studies offer transferable learning opportunities and motivation for the staff of other construction firms seeking to promote integration within their supply chains through innovative procurement routes.

This study aims to examine how different modes of knowledge flows affect the changes of asset specificity and how ownership control moderates the relationship between knowledge flows and asset specificity in the open innovation paradigm.

This paper selects information technology outsourcing as the research base. It uses the feasible weighted least squares modeling method for its analysis and has collected the data from 2,369 research and development contracts of multinational vendor firms in China.

The coupled and outbound knowledge flows have a direct and positive effect on asset specificity. Moreover, the results show that weak corporate control has significant moderating effects on the relationship between both coupled and outbound knowledge flows and asset specificity; the strong control positively moderates the relationship between outbound knowledge flows and asset specificity.

In open innovation, firms build a higher degree of asset specificity to maximize the efficiency of knowledge flows, which then helps them to enhance innovation capacity and market performance.

Preceding studies have tended to examine the influences of asset specificity as an independent variable in a closed innovation paradigm. Asset specificity is hence often left as the antecedent “black box.” This paper, however, opens the “black box” of asset specificity, which is set as a dependent variable, by investigating the influences of knowledge flows on the asset specificity in the context of open innovation. It also reinterprets the role of asset specificity by adopting the lens of open innovation theory.

Firms tend to transfer more knowledge in technology joint ventures compared to contractual technology agreements. Using insights from new institutional economics, this chapter explores to what extent the alliance governance association with interfirm knowledge transfer is sensitive to an evolving industry norm of collaboration connected to the logic of open innovation. The chapter examines 1,888 dyad-year observations on firms engaged in technology alliances in the U.S. information technology industry during 1980–1999. Using fixed effects linear models, it analyzes longitudinal changes in the alliance governance association with interfirm knowledge transfer, and how such changes vary in magnitude across bilateral versus multipartner alliances, and across computers, telecommunications equipment, software, and microelectronics subsectors. Increases in industry-level alliance activity during 1980–1999 improved the knowledge transfer performance of contractual technology agreements relative to more hierarchical equity joint ventures. This effect was concentrated in bilateral rather than multipartner alliances, and in the software and microelectronics rather than computers and telecommunications equipment subsectors. Therefore, an evolving industry norm of collaboration may sometimes make more arms-length governance of a technology alliance a credible substitute for equity ownership, which can reduce the costs of interfirm R&D. Overall, the chapter shows that the performance of material practices that constitute innovation ecosystems, such as interfirm technology alliances, may differ over time subject to prevailing institutional norms of open innovation. This finding generates novel implications for the literatures on alliances, open innovation, and innovation ecosystems.