Home Building Industry Needs to Do a Better Job of Addressing Barriers to Innovation The nation’s housing industry needs to be doing a better job of communicating with public decision makers and educating its workers about innovations in residential construction, according to a two-day roundtable earlier this month in Washington, D.C. that was sponsored by PATH, the Partnership for Advancing Technology in Housing. Exploring the issue of removing barriers to emerging technologies, panelists participating in the meetings — a builder, specification writer, trade/union representative, academic and evaluation and codes representative — agreed that decision makers must be convinced of the value of new products and approaches before they can become successful. Decision makers in the construction industry include production builders, developers, large-scale owners, suppliers, sub-contractors and code officials, roundtable participants found, and they need to be educated about how an innovation will solve an existing problem. Demonstrating cost- and time-savings is a good approach, they noted, but code officials will be more interested in the issue of safety. | 
