Greening the Construction Sector - Towards a Value-Adding Service Industry
GreenConServe sets out to improve the innovation support framework for green service innovators in the construction sector.
The project aims to design, test and implement a two-step voucher scheme providing access to technical and business support to service innovators in the construction industry in Norway, France and Germany. It involves a public-private partnership with professional associations organising training and national innovation agencies providing public funding for the vouchers. The long-term impacts aim at developing a truly European market for comprehensive innovation support services.
Around the physical construction works, a host of knowledge intensive service companies is active in the planning, design, integration of disciplines, monitoring and management of building works. These innovators are crucial for the sector’s paradigm shift to a situation where the built assets are service arenas designed to supply and facilitate a set of environmental and other functional performance services throughout its total life-cycle.
The innovation potential for sustainable construction is tremendous. Yet, too few companies innovate. We face a bottleneck in the innovation value chain calling for public action due to its complexity, the high number of actors involved and a chicken-and-egg situation where supply and demand for innovative construction services currently meet at sub-optimal levels.
While ultimately benefiting SMEs, the aim of the project is not to support SMEs directly, but rather to create an optimised supportive framework for service innovators in cooperation between national innovation agencies, technical and business innovation professionals, and influential market players.
