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Koch-Ørvad, N, Thuesen, C, Koch, C and Berker, T (2018) Murmuration as Metaphor for Sustainable Innovation Processes. In: Gorse, C and Neilson, C J (Eds.), Proceedings 34th Annual ARCOM Conference, 3-5 September 2018, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK. Association of Researchers in Construction Management, 179–188.
- Type: Conference Proceedings
- Keywords: innovation, metaphor, murmuration, sustainable transition.
- ISBN/ISSN: 978-0-9955463-2-5
- URL: http://www.arcom.ac.uk/-docs/proceedings/1fe9ee6e82bd0449556b45f371765813.pdf
- Abstract:
Innovation processes are complex and characterized as chaotic and unpredictable. The construction industry constitutes a loosely coupled context for innovation where activities are depended on collaborative engagements. Focusing on sustainable innovations, the sustainability agenda includes a very broad range of issues to address with the aim to create valuable usage and long-term benefits for users, organizations, eco-systems and society. Thus, sustainable innovations have to be reflexive, adaptive, ‘fluid’, aware of its consequences and open-ended.
The extensiveness of the agenda, the requirements for useful, flexible and open-ended solutions, and the loosely coupled context, including involvement of multiple actors, are factors that all contribute to the fact that sustainable innovation in construction is a highly uncertain and extremely complex process.
In this paper, we introduce the concept of <em>murmuration</em> as a metaphor for sustainable innovation processes in construction. Murmuration is the collective behavior of starlings where thousands of birds perform impressive aerial maneuvers at sunset. Very little is known about how and why such interactions take place, however the main goal is to maintain cohesion of the group when pressured for survival.
A metaphor is an illustrative device that can help illuminate aspects of a system and shadow others, thus creating meaning and understanding of complex situations. We argue that the murmuration metaphor captures the flowing, ever-changing non-structure that characterizes many of the innovation processes within sustainable building that we have been studying. We base our conceptual hypothesis on an empirical observation, and extend our reasoning by exploring the potentials of the metaphor at two interdisciplinary workshops with actors from the Danish construction industry.
Concluding, we discuss the potential implications for practice and further research. We argue that the murmuration metaphor can contribute with a language for understanding, discussing and managing sustainable innovation processes. Furthermore, we suggest that murmuration is a fruitful addition to the macro-level understanding of the societal transition towards sustainability as an elaboration of the niche-to-regime processes emphasized in the Multi-Level Perspective.