Developing a new commercialization model for the residential construction industry

We describe the development of a new model of the commercialization of innovative products in the homebuilding industry. Our research is motivated by previous HUD-sponsored studies of numerous failures of entrepreneurial business ventures in the commercialization of such products, which were caused primarily by poor business strategies. The general approach to our model-building effort consists of three stages: we derive a generic commercialization model from the research literature in business, construction, and concurrent engineering; we derive a classification scheme for innovative products from literature on innovation in product design; we derive a set of specific alterations to our commercialization model in order to reflect the unique challenges of construction products from case studies of innovative products in the homebuilding industry for which commercialization has succeeded or failed.