Modern businesses, especially those on the first rungs of the enterprise ladder, need facilities to accommodate their needs that will neither inhibit growth nor limit current activities. This applies equally to other kinds of organisation, such as health care, social services, other forms of civic amenity, education and leisure.

The real estate sector reacts to the needs of these kinds of organisations. Rarely does it act in anticipation, perhaps for good reason. Even so, this does not help the rapidly growing business or local health centre to manage its activities. A more proactive approach would make sense, but this is hampered by the availability of land for speculative building, the scrutiny of planning authorities and the time for designing, constructing and handing over a new facility.

Even if it were possible to shortcut the planning process, to secure special development funds and to find patient entrepreneurs for such facilities, there is the inevitable lag because of design and construction. Fast-track building solutions can compress time, but these may be either too expensive or inappropriate. Prefabricated buildings for light commercial industrial use have been available for decades, yet too many products are little more than the latest generation of a product whose pedigree can be traced back to agricultural sheds.

Growing businesses may well need other features. They might require flexible, reconfigurable space that they can walk away from if things do not work out for them. From a real estate owner’s perspective, this hardly sounds like good business. Capital investment in buildings means that owners must extract the maximum return from a relatively expensive product, for which a future market is uncertain. Owners are looking generally for a safe return on investment. Regarding these issues as problems means that nothing is done to satisfy the underlying needs outlined above.

The challenge is to turn problems into solutions, by providing a product that can be provided in days, in any reasonable location, in a form that will satisfy planner’s requirements and which can be adapted or removed in a few years’ time. To make this work requires more than trying to refine the existing product – a lightweight construction system, probably modularised, that can be assembled and then disassembled a few years later. It demands that the whole process be rethought, from identifying customer preferences, through design and production and into a use phase lasting a few years only, to adaptation of the building insitu or dismantling, refitting and relocating it elsewhere. The product has to be designed for this life cycle, with a clear plan for how it will be reused at the end of a specified period. It is not about designing buildings that could become permanent features, at a lower capital cost, but about how good quality buildings can be provided for relatively short periods without looking like sheds.

This approach requires total control over the process to recreate modularised buildings that can be fabricated and shipped within days to almost any location, where they can be managed for a specified term and then reused. This is not about reducing the building to its constituent materials, but creating a product with a new lease of life in another place for, possibly, a different use.

Innovation is linked directly to the profit motive for business and is the key to creating and satisfying future markets for goods and services. In the construction sector, most innovation is reckoned to take place within supplier companies, yet these are often the parties most distant from the core processes of design and construction.

Suppliers - taken to include specialist contractors as well as component suppliers - need to be involved far more in the wider construction process than at present. This body, which includes a large proportion of SMEs, is essential to establishing and developing a supply chain for construction that delivers best value and satisfaction to its clients and customers. Procurement methods and policies that make little use of the expertise of suppliers stifle innovation. Specialist contractor and component supplier-led technical innovation has therefore to be encouraged. Support for, and awareness of, the needs of these firms - many of whom are SMEs - is inadequate. Until suppliers are integrated into the supply chain, innovation is unlikely to be properly enabled.

A typical complaint is that little innovation takes place in the course of designing a new building or other structure. This view is only partially true and attempts to do more are frustrated by, inter alia, uncertainty over design liability and the availability of reliable information on how materials, products and systems perform in different combinations and environments.

Public procurement policy has been accused of working against innovation. Lessons can be taken from the promotion of public-private partnership (PPP/PFI) schemes as to how one can instil a culture of innovation through methods and procedures that have been redesigned away from traditional practices. Opportunities exist for public sector customers to encourage innovative proposals without risk of compromising best value or accountability.

Procurement methods that are transparent and that lend themselves to objective assessment and comparison are more likely to lead to improved project results than those that make a mystery out of the process. Efforts to improve supply chain management are discouraged by a reluctance to address this issue. Attention needs to be directed to this area in order to activate the value chain for construction.

Improved access to the results of research and other information, knowledge and expertise would likewise improve performance in the sector. Over the longer term it would contribute directly to a reduction of costs through less rework and deliver higher levels of client and customer satisfaction. Ideas that might help are to be found in the subject on Change & Innovation (under the category of Management).

Research is needed to cover, more specifically and closely, innovation within the value chain for construction. This should examine mechanisms for identifying clients’ and customers' needs and the means for integrating design and production as a single process in which specialist contractors and component suppliers are able to lead technical innovation. Within this, there needs to be an in-depth study of the relationships between product manufacturers, designers, construction companies and specialist contractors and the ways in which these relationships can enable or impede innovation. Answers or, at least, reliable insights could help move the sector forward.