Innovation in construction

The conference held yesterday in Eindhoven was extremely active! In the morning all attendees participated in a simulation game designed together with Frans van Gassel. In groups, participants worked to garner the contract for restructuring a small village’s central square. It was fun, hard work and, from time to time, frustrating -"the municipality doesn't know what it wants, and so there are no clear demands". And, of course, when there are no clear demands, there are no clear solutions either. If there are no clear solutions, constructors need different approaches to support the municipality in realising their goals. The design principles for knowledge productivity implemented in this new approach were used in different ways. Some of the municipalities used them as a source of inspiration whereas others used them directly as criteria to select the contractor of their choice. On the contractors’ side, there were differences as well. Some concentrated on a plan focused on solutions (how the square would look) whereas others planned the process to be followed in order to produce a new design of which citizens, shop-owners and tourists alike would be proud.

Among the speakers in the afternoon was Paul Spierings. His contribution was lively and very much related to the issues my colleague Paul Keursten raised earlier that day. He argues that

• Innovation is needed in the world of construction. However, an interesting fact he mentioned, people in the field of construction appear to have a typical score on the Big Five personality traits. They score above average on the factors Neuroticism and Conscientiousness, their score on the factor Openness to Experience however is below average. This makes them, according to Spierings, no good innovators. They are stable quiet people.
• Spierings gave some amusing and (interesting!) examples of how innovation works. He referred to Frans de Waal who has observed the behaviour of apes and compares it to humans. Frans de Waal describes how innovative behaviour (such as washing the potatoes before eating them) works: a juvenile female named Imo began washing; "she would bring her potatoes to a small river and clean them off before eating them. Imo’s washing behavior spread first to her mother and then to her age peers, before affecting the rest of the group. Later Imo moved her operation to the shoreline, washing the potatoes in the ocean, and, again, the other monkeys followed. The only monkeys on the island that never learned potato washing were the adult males." (taken from this site).