How Incremental Innovation Can Benefit Your Construction Business

The construction industry is poised for change as technology takes hold. But that change is likely to come less in the form of disruption and more in the form of impactful increments.

It’s no secret that construction has tended to lag other industries in terms of productivity enhancements and improvements, especially where technology adoption is involved.“That follows very closely with a long history of thinly capitalized companies, low barriers to entry and low margins in the industry not really providing the adequate amount of capital to allow for investment in it,” says Erin Roberts, global engineering & construction leader, Ernst & Young (EY). He notes construction has been one of the last to adopt even common technologies such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

But this is changing and quickly. In 2018, EY did a study of its contractor clients and asked them what was the most important innovation needed to make their organizations successful. At the time, the No. 1 response was ERP systems. That curve has since steepened.