Few words get used more in our industry, and few mean less by the time they reach a pitch deck. Every new company is innovative. Every new approach is disruptive. If everything is, nothing is.
Every time I hear those words in a pitch, I think of Inigo Montoya in The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."
It is worth slowing down and defining the terms, because how we use them shapes what we build.
What innovation in construction looks like
Invention is a new idea. Innovation is a better way of doing the work that actually gets used, repeated and adopted. In construction, most real innovation is not glamorous. It is a better connection detail, a jig that cuts a step out of a station, a sequence that lets two trades work at once, a window frame profile engineered once and installed the same way a thousand times.
The factory built housing industry is full of examples. The need to move homes down the highway pushed builders toward lighter, tested components and toward thinking about buildings as products that improve version after version. Many of those improvements came from people on the plant floor solving the same problem again and again until it stayed solved.
What disruptive innovation really means
Disruption has a specific meaning that often gets lost. As Clayton Christensen and his coauthors described it, a disruptive innovation usually starts at the low end of a market or in a new market that established players overlook, then improves until it pulls mainstream customers along. It is not simply a new company that promises to replace everyone.
Construction has seen plenty of the second kind. Big promises, big capital, and a hard landing when the promise met the realities of design, permitting, logistics and the field. None of those are technology problems, which is the point I made last month about why offsite construction adoption is slow.
It is the Ian Malcolm problem from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." In construction the better question is whether we should, and then whether we can do it twice.
Is disruption in construction good?
Sometimes. For the end customer, a better and cheaper way to deliver a building is good news. For everyone inside the system, disruption is painful, and construction is a web of small businesses: trade contractors, suppliers, designers, inspectors and crews. Those are the people who know how buildings actually go together.
Is disruption the goal? No. Construction does not need to be blown up. It needs to be industrialized, and the fastest way to do that is to bring the people who know how to build along with us, rather than trying to build around them.
Innovation that never makes it to the second project is not innovation. It is a prototype.