Collaborative Innovation for Sustainable Construction: The Case of an Industrial Construction Project Network

Abstract

Sustainable construction requires effective innovation in construction projects. Innovations involved multiple professionals and participants, inter-organization collaborative among stakeholders is considered as a feature and basic demand for innovation management. Exploring complicated interaction relations of stakeholders in inter-organization collaborative innovation, which is an important guarantee to realize innovation in sustainable construction. The network was viewed as a complex system that can replace stable organizational structure and procedures. It is necessary to shed light on the internal mechanism of innovation from the network perspective to promote the performance of innovation. This article investigates the project network of an industrial construction project in China by adopting the social network method and in-depth quantitative data analysis. Based on the network data and qualitative interview, the structure of the project network in the process of innovation for sustainable construction is analyzed, the key actor in the innovation management is revealed, and the influence factors of the inter-organization collaborative is pointed out. Research results will help promote the inter-organization collaborative innovation and improve the efficiency of sustainable construction.