On the adoption of innovation in the housing sector

Industrialization, digitalization and innovation in housing are essential if one is to address problems such as an increasing demand for affordable housing, labour shortages, the sector’s significant environmental impact and fast-changing market needs. This requires substantial innovations. Ideally, these innovations will not only contribute to shorter building times, lower failure costs, a higher build quality, but also result in more sustainable and circular building concepts. However, to benefit from such innovations, they have to be adopted on a large scale. When inno¬vations have been successfully applied in pilots and demonstration pro¬jects, they tend to be adopted only on a small scale and fail to diffuse in the market. A more in-depth understanding of the adoption of an inno¬vation within a specific housing project, and subsequently in other hou¬sing projects, could have a substantial impact on its adoption rate. The research reported in this thesis aims to enhance current understanding of the adoption of innovations in the housing sector. The emphasis is on the determinants and mechanisms that affect the decisions of construction stakeholders regarding the adoption of innovations in housing projects. The insights that have been developed and described in this thesis may hopefully contribute to increasing the adoption rate of effective innova¬tive solutions and through this, to boost the availability of affordable, sustainable and circular housing in the Netherlands.