Using Culture's Influence for Construction Innovation: Challenging the Industry

In the nowadays economic downturn, construction industry has been severely hit. Where at the one hand only negative news is published regarding this, at the other hand there are also appearing new opportunities for this sector to recover. However, at least these developments can give a fertile soil for starting, introducing and implementing innovations. This paper focuses on the positive part of these developments, merely as a challenge, i.e.: How to ‘boost’ construction innovation, and especially how to make a positive use of the incluence of organization’s culture for such a ‘boost’? It describes and analyzes an actual case study, existing of an innovation project within a consortium of parties, originating from the healthcare industry and from the construction & real estate industry. The described project ‘Twentse Aanpak’ focuses on an innovative integrated approach for transition of the healthcare industry and its (housing) facilities, which is actually (i.e. December 2009) under roll-out with the start-up of (pilote)projects in The Netherlands. The results are be divided in project-aspects and consortium-aspects. Broadly, the results represent the fact that ‘innovation’ as a goal can only function if it is put seriously on the central management’s actual agendas. Parallel to that, it points out that there is a need for a hands-on approach and defining clear goals when starting (complicated) innovation projects; especially, because of the fact that decision-making about choosing solutions seems still to be very complex. Other results focus on the experiences that (during working with practitioners as well as experts) create a very challenging environment, often resulting into different viewpoints and input, but therefore also assuming different ways of communication-levels and -styles (i.e. different business-cultures). And because of the different branches working together within such an innovation-consortium, the general active business-cultural backgrounds of these branches (here: healthcare vs. construction-real estate) do also lead to differences in behaviour and understanding. A perfect match will be difficult, but being aware of these differences might lead to a better and more succesful (management of the) consortium and its innovative project-results.