The cult of customer responsiveness: is design innovation the price of a client‐focused construction industry?

Abstract

Much has been written about the positive contribution made by the customer to innovation in bespoke and low‐volume products like those of construction. Far less attention has been given to the potentially corrosive effects the client might have on innovation. Drawing on three construction case studies, this paper argues that strong client leadership may have negative consequences for innovation, including the suppression of innovation and an overly narrow focus on particular types of innovation. Given that innovation has a key role in the future competitiveness of any industry, it is argued that the role of the client in construction innovation requires more careful examination than it has thus far been afforded.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.