Client strategies for stimulating innovation in construction

The construction industry is often described as a fragmented, loosely coupled industry, slow to innovate and lacking in productivity. In order to address these issues, the role of client organisations is commonly acknowledged as a key actor for change. However, what this role constitutes of is less clear e.g. questions arise such as: should innovation be mainly supplier-led or client-led? It is a well-rehearsed truth that the fragmentation of the industry hampers innovation due to e.g. lack of long-term relationships and difficulties of learning between projects. Thus, efforts towards more collaboration and integration among organisations are often recommended to provide better support for innovation. In this paper we present the rationale behind two, what we would like to call “innovation strategies”, simultaneously deployed by a large public client in Sweden. The organisation is trying to stimulate supplier-led innovation through providing more flexibility in projects, enabling suppliers to propose new solutions, emphasising competition on the market and essentially build on the fragmentation of the industry; while the other strategy, found in the implementation of BIM, builds on primarily client-led innovation, actively incentivizing collaboration and integration along the supply chain. The purpose of this paper is to discuss and analyse the rationale behind these two strategies that seemingly builds on two different ideas about the client role. The research finds that although these strategies may be understood as conflicting when juxtaposed, the strategies make use of different aspects of fragmentation and integration to stimulate implementation of innovation. Thus, clients should be aware of these, at first glance, conflicting strategies for implementation of innovation in order to make use of the benefits fragmentation and integration might provide in stimulating innovation in construction.