Empirical Assessment of Nigerian Construction Industry Consultancy Services Innovation Practices

Abstract: Debates on how to improve construction industry productivity have been on and a number of studies blamed the construction industry inefficiency on the lackadaisical / indolent disposition of the industry key players to innovative changes. This study is therefore carried out to investigate the level of innovation adoption of the construction industry Consultants that played pivotal roles in the conceptualization, planning and development of construction projects. A cross-sectional study was adopted using 5-point Likert structured questionnaire administered to stratified and randomly selected 500 construction consultants which includes Architectural, Quantity Surveying, Building, engineering and Consortium of services firms ’ consultants operating in Nigeria. A total of 285 properly completed responses were returned and analysed for the study. The collected data were subjected to Descriptive statistical tool of the SPSS for MS Windows and the results obtained were interpreted with the Rogers’ Innovation Diffusion Theory to determine the level of innovation practices among the studied consultants. It was found that the construction industry consultants operating in Nigeria (Abuja and Environs) are adopters of process, product/technological and business system innovations. This result implies that the studied consultants adopt process, product/technological and business system innovations in their consultancy services operations. The major contributions of the paper include the extension of Rogers