- Title
- Exploitation, exploration and innovation in small-medium sized enterprises
- Creator
- Brewer, Graham; Gajendran, Thayaparan; Dainty, Andrew
- Relation
- RICS COBRA 2013. Proceedings of RICS COBRA 2013 (New Delhi, India 10-12 September, 2013)
- Relation
- http://www.lawlectures.co.uk/w113/cobra2013.htm
- Publisher
- Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2013
- Description
- The innovativeness of firms within the architectural, engineering, and construction (AEC) sector has long been characterised as being poor, generally decreasing in relation to the size of the firm under consideration. Successive industry reviews have highlighted this problem, criticising the industry for its lack of innovativeness, and promoting various solutions including increased collaboration. In many respects this advice has been aimed at the largest contracting enterprises in the expectation that they would be best placed to lead industry change. Paradoxically, whilst small- to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) account for over 98% of construction businesses, and generate the bulk of the value delivered by the architectural, engineering and construction sector, their performance in relation to the adoption of "disruptive technologies" such as high level ICT – and particularly Building Information Modelling (BIM) – hampers their ability to innovate. Importantly, this also inhibits the effectiveness of larger enterprises wishing to innovate, since they are dependent upon the capabilities of their supply chain partners to engage with them using high-level ICT/BIM. However, when viewed from the SME perspective the desire to generate sustainable competitive advantage through innovation requires a proportionately larger commitment. Crucially it also diverts resources away from its normal efforts to maximise income and profit through its existing enterprises, representing a significant risk and perhaps even threatening its continued existence. In essence this requires the SME to display organisational ambidexterity by engaging in two contradictory activities: exploitation of existing resources and ability to maximise profits, and; exploration of new innovations through the acquisition of new resources and development of new capabilities. This paper utilises two alternative ambidexterity lenses and two contrasting measures of innovativeness to investigate an AEC sector SME, which has previously been identified to be innovative. It describes the reanalysis of existing data in a single pilot case study, presenting preliminary results and suggesting implications for future research.
- Subject
- innovation; ambidexterity; hypercube; ICT; BIM; SME
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1048694
- Identifier
- uon:14940
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781783210305
- Language
- eng
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