Getting Innovations Adopted in the Housing Sector

Housing innovation has to travel through a whole project network

In this article, we brought together research on a persistent housing problem: why are useful innovations so difficult to adopt? Housing projects deal with slow delivery, cost overruns, low productivity, quality problems and environmental impact. New products, processes and systems can help, but technical availability does not make an idea widely usable. Projects are assembled through temporary networks of clients, designers, contractors, suppliers and regulators, which makes coordinated change difficult.

We carried out a systematic narrative review of 94 scientific studies on innovation adoption in housing. Our aim was to build a taxonomy of housing innovations, bring together the mechanisms that support or obstruct adoption, and develop propositions for future research. The review covered Web of Science, Scopus and the ARCOM construction database, with a structured snowballing process to extend the evidence base.

Adoption is a process of communication and learning

We define adoption as a communication, learning and decision-making process around an economically valuable, non-trivial improvement that is new to one or more stakeholders in a housing project. That definition matters because innovation is not an isolated object. Before it becomes normal practice, it has to be discussed, understood, evaluated and accepted at the many interfaces of a project.

From the literature, we identified four main categories of determinants: the external environment, innovation attributes, industry characteristics and adopter characteristics. Regulation, incentives, markets and policy can create opportunity or pressure. Relative advantage, compatibility, complexity and observability shape perceived value. Fragmentation, contracts and supply-chain coordination affect implementation. Knowledge, priorities, attitudes and risk perceptions shape whether people select a proposal.

One striking finding is that the literature does not report radical, discontinuous innovation in housing of the kind associated with high-tech sectors. Change is mostly incremental and depends on coordinating many actors around project-specific decisions. Our practical message is therefore to look beyond the product: better adoption requires communication, learning, compatibility and shared value across the network that carries an innovation from a promising pilot into repeated use.