Overcoming barriers to innovation: Demonstrating an argument in favour of communication arenas

Continuous development efforts including steady-state innovations are necessary for such purposes as of improving shortterm performance. However, there is also the need to enable more radical renewal, where development efforts typically stretch beyond the single-project milieu. Supplier-led innovation towards e.g. affordable, sustainable building constitutes such an example. To open up for more radical renewal, one implication of an earlier proposed innovation-barrier/enabler model is the need for sustainable client-contractor arenas for communication, enabling the continuous re-thinking of current experience and understanding by allowing for clients' and contractors' different/conflicting meanings to surface and interact. In Swedish building such arenas seem to be lacking. Underpinning the argumentation is previous research addressing barriers for supplier-led innovation from theoretical perspectives of organizational information-processing and descriptive behavioural decision-making. To better understand the significance of suggested arenas, data were collected in three steps. First, representatives of a building company were interviewed about their personal views regarding barriers/enablers for supplier-led innovation and what primarily determine clients' accept/reject of the builder’s standardized system solution. Second, the building-company representatives met with representatives from three client organizations for a round-table discussion concerning barriers to innovation and sector renewal, and means to overcome. Finally, follow-up interviews with building-company representatives sought to capture personal reflections following from foregoing discussion. Collected data were analysed in relation to the previously proposed model, thus simultaneously developing the model and making it more accessible to building practitioners. Cross-analyses of interviews and client-contractor discussion revealed multiple gaps of understanding. Furthermore, to open up for innovation challenging steady-state it is suggested that both client organizations and contractor organizations need to pay close attention to how meanings and understandings are formed and shared within as well as between organizations. A subsequent implication is the need for a more systematically employed communication arena, stretching beyond the short-term project milieu.