Making Sense of Innovation in the Built Environment

This book offers a new understanding of innovation in project-based firms. It argues that a sensemaking approach is a useful means for explaining innovation and has important implications for policy makers, project managers, academics and students. Through a longitudinal research study into innovation in project-based firms, the book addresses some key themes, challenges and concerns that practitioners face when managing innovation in the built environment. The book focuses on the lived stories of innovation as mobilised by practitioners from large UK construction, engineering and infrastructure corporations. A sensemaking perspective is utilised that offers a shift closer towards understanding socially constructed and contested stories of innovation. The book has practical implications for how organisational activities become labelled as ‘innovation’ and for what purpose. It will be argued that it is striking how so many of the formal narratives of innovation at the policy level display so little connectivity with the lived narratives of innovation articulated by practitioners.

The book provides a detailed examination of the drivers for innovation in construction, engineering and infrastructure organisations. In particular, the questions of how and why innovation becomes recognised and sustained over time are explored. Applying a sensemaking framework to explain innovation in both practical and accessible ways, and combining the theory and practice, this book presents an insightful view on the implications of innovation in the business world today.

Natalya Sergeeva is a Lecturer in the Management of Projects at the Bartlett School of Construction and Project Management, University College London, UK.