Swedish construction MSEs: simply renovators or renovation service innovators?

ABSTRACT

To address the renovation needs of detached house stock in Sweden, micro and small-sized enterprises (MSEs), a subgroup of small and medium-sized enterprises, are expected to introduce more comprehensive house renovation solutions. One-stop-shop (OSS) is an innovative Product-Service System model that can enable MSEs to offer comprehensive renovation packages instead of existing fragmented solutions. We have applied a conceptual framework for innovation adoption in organizations and conducted an interview of 21 construction MSEs in three different geographical areas in Sweden to examine their perceptions and preparedness to adopt the OSS business concept. Findings showed that the examined MSEs are positive towards OSS as it could address the needs for the comprehensive renovation of detached houses. However, presently, are not prepared to take the coordinator’s role in such a concept mainly due to the perceived business risks, the lack of flexibility to organizational restructuring, and lack of resources and management competency to coordinate multiple tasks and actors. Those organizations lacked awareness of existing policy support and access to funding mechanisms to try new business models. As a solution, they proposed an external coordinator to be the provider of OSS, on the trial phase, whose role and characteristics need to be further examined.

KEYWORDS:

• Innovation adoption
• construction MSEs
• one-stop-shop
• organizational innovation
• business model
• detached houses

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the interviewees for offering their precious time and for the interesting and lively discussions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Georgios Pardalis http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7143-8198

Krushna Mahapatra http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4405-1056

Brijesh Mainali http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0189-474X

Additional information

Funding

The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the Kamprad Family Foundation for Entrepreneurship, Research & Charity, Smarthousing Småland, and European Union Horizon 2020 project ‘INNOVATE'.