Routinization of Sustainable Innovation in Public Sector (A LEED Analysis)

Innovation can be defined as "The use of non-trivial change and improvement in a process, product or the system that is novel to the institution developing the change" (Slaughter1998). And once an innovation is constantly used by an organization on a regular basis, it leads to routinization. Rogers (2003) defines routinization as "when an innovation has become incorporated into the regular activities of the organization and has lost its separate identity." We also know from the prior research that the innovation could be segregated as per its technical attributes (process or product Innovation), types of innovation (incremental or radical innovation) or economic attributes (direct or indirect economic innovation).Through this study we are trying to observe whether public sector organizations routinize sustainable innovations that are used in the initial projects, and can a relationship be established between the selected attributes of those innovations including process-product, direct-indirect, radical-incremental innovation that may explain their routinization. The LEED Checklist was used as the baseline for studying routinization in public sector organizations. A group of four public sector organizations namely: Arizona State University, University of Florida, City of Austin and City of Seattle were selected on the basis of the constraints that were identified in the early stages of the study. Upon selecting these organizations the LEED Checklists were analyzed and the routinized credits were segregated. The LEED Checklist we segregated on the basis of the attributes of the innovation. To confirm the accuracy of the sorting process an Inter-Rater Reliability was established with the help of an expert panel. The results determined from the segregation process were made to overlap on the routinized credits from the LEED Checklist and the data retrieved was used for the final analysis. During the process of establishing the final results for this research, we segregated the general credits from the prerequisites to avoid any skewing of the results considering that both types of credits were based on different concepts. The results show that public sector organizations do routinize sustainable innovations that were used in the initial projects, and incremental innovation diffuses faster than the radical innovation; product innovation diffuses faster than process innovation; and direct economic innovation diffuses faster than the indirect economic innovation.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master of Science

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Building Construction

Department dc:contributor.department

Building Construction

Grantor dc:publisher

Virginia Tech

Year dc:date.issued

2008

Author dc:creator

• Langar, Sandeep

Chair dc:contributor.committeechair

• Pearce, Annie R.

Committee members dc:contributor.committeemember

• Ku, Ki-hong
• O'Brien, Michael J.

• Routinization
• Sustainable Innovation
• Attributes of Innovation

Statement dc:rights

• In Copyright

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

Dc Identifier Other

etd-06072012-123452

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/33475