Implementing and diffusing innovation at a Swedish construction company : The case of implementing the digital delivery container

Abstract: The construction industry is often perceived as conservative and slow to innovate. Previous studies have explanations for why this is the case and attempt to look further into why implementing and diffusing innovation in the construction industry is different, and somewhat more challenging than in other industries. Some point towards the fact that a construction project is somewhat a ‘temporary factory’, where the end product being produced is the factory itself. This creates challenges which other industries do not face, making it difficult to optimize construction projects. Furthermore, is the construction industry a multiorganizational industry, and activities are project based. That means that there are often multiple projects going on parallel, with multiple actors involved, making the industry complex. In this paper, we conduct a single case study on the implementation of a digital innovation at a large Swedish construction company. The company is a highly decentralized, project-based organization making the study about implementing innovation in such organizations. The results were analyzed using Rogers’ framework for the diffusion of innovation. We were able to identify four facilitating factors, along with one hindering factor, for our case of implementing an innovation at a decentralized project-based construction organization. The facilitators were: the innovation should to be somewhat simple to understand and use, the projects implementing the solution require extra resources to be willing to take the risk of implementing a new solution, the implementation needs driven individuals to keep the momentum of the solution going and push the solution through the complex organization, and finally is it helpful to use marketing internally at the organization to bring attention to the solution. Finally, the hinder identified was simply internal politics and the complicated organizational structure of the firm.