A co-evolutionary approach to understanding construction industry innovation in renovation practices for low carbon outcomes

Energy consumption in buildings is a large contributor to global CO2 emissions. Renovations of existing buildings can reduce their impact by integrating technologies which increase efficiency or generate renewable energy on-site. Doing this well and at scale is a collective action problem, which transcends the agency of individual entrepreneurs. This paper reports a cross-case comparison of four previous studies focused on low-energy renovation of housing, using a co-evolutionary framework in which five systems are mutually interdependent: ecosystems, technologies, user practices, business strategies, and institutions. Innovations across the five systems are described in terms of variations, selection pressures and transmission. The analysis serves a dual purpose: to draw out common themes from the four previous studies, and to reflect on how well the co-evolutionary framework accounts for innovation in the particular field of housing renovation for low-energy outcomes. Business strategies emerge as an important (and often neglected) source of innovation. The framework generally accounts for innovation in this area quite well, although two important issues are a less easy fit: the use of energy (and other finite resources) is rather indirectly accounted for by the term ‘ecosystems’; and the complexity of interactions between multiple users, businesses and technologies is partly elided.