Go on any well-known architecture firm or construction company’s website and you’ll see some variation of this word:
💫 innovation.
✨ innovative.
🌟 innovating.
🤩 innovator.
Without belaboring on what #innovation is, or isn’t, many of these organizations do have the chops to back up this claim. Yet, with equally substantiated arguments, many criticize the building industry for not being innovative enough.
Turns out, this may say less about the novel #ideas that the talent in our industry can generate and have more to do with the deeper #systems and constructs that govern it.
In the book “How Innovation Works: and why it flourishes in freedom”, Matt Ridley discusses “the phenomenon of disinnovation” in nuclear power. Recognized as the most promising source of energy developed in the twentieth century, more recently, it’s a technology that seems to be 'stuck'. The primary reason he calls out is “lack of opportunity to experiment”. This is influenced by other major factors like cost inflation/escalation, regulation (given demanded safety standards), time to permit and build, and the sheer scale of the reactors that make physical iteration challenging. There are hundreds of prototype-level designs for alternatives to the pressurized-water reactor such as liquid-metal or liquid-salt, but the costs per experiment are too high. As such, nuclear power stations are treated more like one-off projects where every aspect of the design needs to be resolved and validated in advance of realizing and operating it commercially.
Fellow building industry professionals - does this sound a little bit too familiar??
The parallels were hard for me to ignore. Other industries, like aerospace, aviation, naval architecture, infrastructure (energy, transportation, resources), etc. that involve engineering and building large, complex, physical assets and structures, surely deal with similar hurdles. Optimistically, the building industry does have differences from nuclear power, but it’s going to require systemic change and #transformation. On top of this, addressing urgent, global problems depends on our ability to innovate, which may or may not be a fair ask.
🤔 Or maybe it's these urgent problems that are spurring a revival for 'stuck technologies'...
⚡What might it take to protect the building industry from encountering “the phenomenon of disinnovation”?
💡Where have you found opportunities to experiment?
