Federal Strategies for Promoting Innovation in Housing

Over the past 100 years, significant innovations have occurred in the housing industry. Despite these accomplishments, industry characteristics and participant motives can present challenges to the innovation process that likely reduce and slow the industry's rate of innovation. This report has shown that the federal government has long recognized both the benefits and challenges associated with innovation and has invested in R&D, passed laws to facilitate technology transfer , and created federal programs to support and accelerate innovation in this industry. It is precisely because the benefits of innovation are so great and because the need for innovation continues today that this report proposes strategies to improve innovation within the existing industry rather than calling for reforms that will be difficult or impractical to implement. This report closes by proposing strategies that the federal government can use to improve innovation. These strategies are organized according to the innovation model presented in Chapter Two. Shown below, this model can be thought of as having four primary components as labeled on the right of Figure 6.1: research, knowledge base, the ID3 pipeline, and market forces.