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Home Building Industry Needs to Do a Better Job of Addressing Barriers to Innovation

The nation’s housing industry needs to be doing a better job of communicating with public decision makers and educating its workers about innovations in residential construction, according to a two-day roundtable earlier this month in Washington, D.C. that was sponsored by PATH, the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing.

Exploring the issue of removing barriers to emerging technologies, panelists participating in the meetings — a builder, specification writer, trade/union representative, academic and evaluation and codes representative — agreed that decision makers must be convinced of the value of new products and approaches before they can become successful.

Decision makers in the construction industry include production builders, developers, large-scale owners, suppliers, sub-contractors and code officials, roundtable participants found, and they need to be educated about how an innovation will solve an existing problem. Demonstrating cost- and time-savings is a good approach, they noted, but code officials will be more interested in the issue of safety.

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The panelists reached a consensus on several other points:

• With subcontractors being used extensively by builders of all sizes, the diversity of languages spoken by workers can pose a barrier to changes in conventional practices. There is currently a shortage of product and installation materials in languages other than English, and translated materials should focus on basic installation and safety issues.
• Existing educational channels such as VoTech, secondary school, on-the-job training and university programs are insufficient to meet the construction industry’s basic needs let alone support innovation. Face-to-face contact is still the best way of providing education, but for younger generations Internet communications is becoming increasingly effective.
• Larger companies are more inclined to adopt innovation incrementally, while smaller companies are more likely to be the pioneers in systems innovations.
• Partnerships can significantly influence the advancement of innovation.
• The current housing boom may not be the best time for innovation. More challenging times, when builders are struggling to find ways to rise above the competition, may be better.

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