A good chunk of my sunny Sunday was spent in a garage sleuthing through archives from the most ambitious New Zealand housing consortium to date – Industrialised Building Systems.

Perhaps you have heard the story; it goes like this – in the 1970s, a team led by Keith Hay, a property developer from Palmerston North, poured close to $2.5 million into the research and development of a panel-based modular housing system that was poised to produce over 1200 housing units per annum and revolutionise the way housing was delivered in New Zealand. There was considerable investment interest from the New Zealand government, the Victorian state government was keen and the Americans thought it was the next best thing since sliced-bread.

What went wrong? Well, a combination of things, including the 1978 recession and political interference that didn’t want the ‘status quo’ to be interrupted. Aha – this is the bit that really hit home.

Trawling a bit further through the garage archives of Roger Hay (IBS research architect), I found this quote from another IBS team member Owen McShane. At the 1973 ‘Efficiency in Building’ symposium in Wellington there was a panel discussion between presenters including Peter Beaven and McShane – at one point McShane said:
“So you say at conferences, ‘Let us have a major reform!’ but in the real nitty gritty from day to day living, you say ‘Leave it alone because we know it’”

This is particularly relevant as we head towards a forum based around innovation and change, the “James Hardie PrefabNZ Innovation Event” on June 28th at BuildNZ in Auckland. All the right puzzle pieces are in place; there’s a fantastic line-up of provocative speakers addressing the macro-economic context (NZ Institute) and high-level construction industry strategy (Productivity Partnership) as well as numerous speakers about ground-breaking precedents (First Light House) and new products to market….

But what is this for, if all we do is get excited and pumped up on the day, and then go back to our desks and work-benches to maintain the status quo the next day? Hmmm.

As Malcolm Gladwell said in ‘What the Dog Sees’, “innovation is disruptive”, and he has a point. For sure change hurts, if it’s all a bit too comfortable then we aren’t changing and we’re certainly not risking actually improving.

We all know that fridge magnet, the one that says if we keep on doing the same thing, then we will keep on getting the same results. We will see clients continuing to embark on construction products optimistically, only to be spat out the other end, ravaged by cost and time overruns, and pledging never to do that again. What is this costing our industry?

Or worse, we keep on doing the same thing, only working longer and harder and still getting the same results. Even worse, undercutting our fellow industry members, driving prices and profits down, until someone has to drop out of the game. What is this costing our industry?

How about working smarter, more efficiently – we’ve all heard of lean construction, prefabrication and modern methods of construction. How do we put these changes in place? There is a real need for collaboration and co-opetition – for businesses across the supply and material spectrum to work together. All of us need to work cleverly together in the same team to create these opportunities. Join a network and keep informed – check out www.prefabnz.com/Directory for your future collaborators.