Implementación de la segunda S: Organizar

To collect the qualitative data from the contractors interviews were held. In order to create a better understanding about the value of the data the goal of the interviews is described, the questionnaire which was used, the selection process of the contractors and the coding and validation process of the data.

Goal:

The goal of the interviews was to create an understanding on the important factors

influencing the upscaling process of product innovations at contractors for large construction projects of RWS. Questions mainly focused on when does a contractor diffuse, adopt and apply an innovation, what types of innovations, and what are important barriers and

stimulants for scaling up product innovations. It was especially focused on large construction projects of RWS which is needed to get an understanding where RWS could influence the upscaling process of product innovations.

Questionnaire:

With the current theoretical framework in chapter 3 focusing on the upscaling of product innovations a questionnaire with open questions was formulated. To get an answer on the sub-question 5 “how are contractors influenced to apply product innovations in tenders of RWS” the focus in this research lies at the adoption and diffusion process of Rogers (2003) looking at the characteristics of the innovation, the communication channels used, the time and the social system. Furthermore the innovation strategy of companies was asked specifically to see where different organizations are focusing on and to see if and how it is related to RWS. The innovation strategy is also an important organizational factor which could influence the adoption, implementation and upscaling of product innovations. Finally barriers and stimulants to scale up product innovations are asked to get a better

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understanding on where RWS should focus on. Some questions and answers were deleted since they had no relevance or value for the research. It resulted in the following

questionnaire, see appendix C – Questionnaire. Selection process contractors:

By analysing different organizations and checking for differences in the size of the companies it should be taken into account that biases can occur. The validity of the outcomes are registered at one point in time and from one person of each contractor. This will be taken into account when coding and validating the results. It is difficult to know how many employees are really active for only the road construction industry especially focusing on large contracts of RWS. Together with experts of RWS, who are related to the road construction companies and stimulating innovations in projects, the companies and the interviewed persons of contractors were chosen. This method is the so called purposive (judgemental) sampling, meaning a type of nonprobability sampling in which the units to be observed are selected on the basis of researcher's judgment about which ones will be the most useful or representative (Babbie, p.193). The list with the contractors, the indicated amount of employees of the whole organization, the interviewed persons and their functions are described in appendix D – Companies and interviewed persons.

Coding and validation

All interviews were recorded with permission of the interviewees, one person filled in the questionnaire digitally due to a lack of time, see appendix E2 – Ooms Civiel. The interview with Volker Wessels, see appendix E8, was excluded since it became clear during the interview that KWS Infra is the executive company for the GWW for Volker Wessels and the managing director believed in a strongly decentralized structure where all daughter

companies should run most activities on their own without steering from a corporate level towards i.e. innovations. Therefore only the data of KWS is used since an overlap of these two could influence the outcome of the data were only 10 contractors were interviewed. All information was formulated carefully and described at each point of the questionnaire as good as possible, see all outcomes in appendix E. The first conclusion to be drawn from the outcomes is that it was difficult to get a clear understanding about the adoption and diffusion process of product innovations in general. For example the most important characteristics and communication channels differ between products, persons but also organizations. Another point of attention was the fact that most contractors only developed innovations

themselves or with partners and didn’t bought (most of their) innovations or diffuse their own innovations towards other competitors. Furthermore only one person was asked for each organization where communication channels and the innovation decision-making process are especially focused on face-to-face meetings of several involved employees. The data made it unable to generalize the diffusion process for product innovations since each has its own advantages, complexity, regulations they need to comply to et cetera especially due to the unique project-based tenders. Therefore the most important findings are summed up for the diffusion process as to get an understanding on what possible ways contractors use which could then be used in further research to check which were specifically important for different product innovations in different tenders and how these differ over time looking at the

innovation-decision process of several individuals. Also the members of a social system within a company have to be analysed more thoroughly to see how they influence each other and how it influences the innovation-decision process and the upscaling of product

innovations. Coding was used for the gathered data to combine different stimulants and barriers related to the described antecedents from the theoretical framework. Coding was also used to remove double answers and to make the answers readable. The theoretical framework of antecedents, stimulants and barriers, will therefore be used as a guideline where new barriers and stimulants could be added.

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