Abstract
The study presents and analyzes innovation metrics in construction and civil engineering, domains which are found to lag behind other fields of science and technology in terms of innovation output. A specific line of focus is put on research and development (R&D) both in academia and industry. Scientific production is analyzed by treating eighteen of the oldest peer-reviewed journals in the field with over a hundred thousand articles published over the past fifty years. The aim is to capture and interpret trends with respect to four field verticals: (i) new materials and systems (hardware), (ii) digitalization, (iii) environmental impact and (iv) novelty/efficiency. The analysis reveals distinctive rates of innovation for each vertical, with some slowing down, as innovation becomes standardized and mainstream, and others peaking up, stemming from developments in other fields of science. Results are treated with respect to the S-curve technology maturity framework which accounts for effort and time towards development and the widely adopted scale of technology readiness levels. Further, corporate innovation is analyzed through patent search covering twelve key inventors and various technology focuses. While no straightforward approach exists to present innovation metrics without considering the broader socio-political and economic context, the present work seeks to provide a comprehensive monitoring of the progress in the field which reflects capital, time and effort put together, towards advancing propositions for future research.
Highlights
Both in times of crisis and prosperity, striving for innovation reflects efforts towards achieving competitive advantages and increasing the overall techno-economic and environmental efficiency of products and systems
The present study monitors trends in scientific literature from the fields of construction and civil engineering, which indicate the mo mentum, maturity and respective penetration that innovative concepts and procedures achieve over the course of the past fifty years
Insight is offered into distinguishing between corporate innovation and academic research by analyzing and comparing patent output and scientific arti cles with respect to four key categories that inspire, drive and grow innovation
Summary
Both in times of crisis and prosperity, striving for innovation reflects efforts towards achieving competitive advantages and increasing the overall techno-economic and environmental efficiency of products and systems. According to Sargent (2019), total global research and development (R&D) expenditures have nearly tripled, from $676 billion to $2.0 tril lion, between 2000 and 2017. From the $2.0 trillion invested in 2017, only $0.145 trillion was spent by governments on university R&D (World Economic Forum, 2019, Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), 2019), with nearly 60% of it, invested in five coun tries (US, Germany, China, France, Australia). The above preliminary gap identified between publicly funded and corporate R&D becomes even more pronounced when considering available data on innovation output per field. The same inventors were responsible for just 3% of all scientific articles published during the same period. This reveals a preliminary important gap between the two metrics, i.e. patent and scientific output
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