| . Introduction Industrialized construction technology (ICT) is widely used in several countries and regions around the world, including Japan, the United States, Europe and China (including Hong Kong), relying on the innovative use of solar energy systems, maintenance of natural external insulation systems, high-quality, performance and highly flexible industrial internal facilities and products, etc., (Liu et al., 2012)., and inevitably involves a high degree of prefabricated components (Pizzi et al., 2012). However, the construction industry is well-known for its low level of innovation (e.g., Noktehdan et al., 2015) due to the one-ofa-kind nature of its projects, site production, temporary multi organizations and regulatory intervention (Koskela and Vrijhoef, 2001), resulting in the new industrialized building method having low integration and inferior quality components due to poor construction technology standards and security systems. This is attributable to the difference between construction innovation and traditional innovation as exemplified by the manufacturing industry (Slaughter, 2000). As a project-based industry, construction involves many participants, with each party being an independent organizational entity chasing its own interests and perceived incentives from the project (Ofori and Moonseo, 2006) and playing different functional roles in the innovative process. The solution to the industry’s innovation problem therefore is to overcome these differences by greater collaboration of those involved by what has been termed collaborative innovation relationships (Gilson et al., 2009). The optimizing of collaborative relationships among construction innovation organizations can prompt construction innovation development. A construction organization must possess all the prerequisite resources needed to adopt a novel technology and optimizing collaborative relationships can drive the decision to adopt such a technology (Nikas et al., 2007). The construction industry, professional organizations and the government need to form a broad collaboration in order to develop competent professionals (Toor and Ofori, 2008). Although collaborative relationships can prompt construction innovation development, there is a lack of widely accepted indicators and criteria to assess the performance of collaborative designs (Ren et al., 2013). Progress to date in forming such relationships has been slow. Stakeholders of industrialized building, for example, have initially established a union of collaborative innovation but little is known of its success in providing innovations or of the influence of different aspects of the relationships involved. Social network analysis (SNA) offers a potential means of studying such influences on innovation in terms of interaction frequency, emotional intensity, reciprocal exchange, network size, network density, centrality, relationship strength, network position, promotion, enterprise scale, nature and experience. From such an analysis, if appropriate, it is then possible to maximize the innovation obtained by inter-organizational collaboration in promoting the performance of ICT and thus enhancing the development of the industrialized construction process |
