Innovation and clustering: lessons from the construction sector and critical success factors for adoption and implementation. Lost cause or lacuna?

Innovation through clustering has proven to work well in a range of industries and geographic regions. However, significant numbers of clusters fail, especially in the Greek construction industry. It appears that certain critical success factors are required, raising the need for research to better understand how the critical success factors’ influence innovation. For this paper an interesting and challenging innovation context is selected, namely the Greek construction sector, which represents a fusion of small organisation size, brutal economic climate and an array of attitudes towards innovation. Through a questionnaire with 92 managers and ten in-depth interviews, the findings indicate that the Greek construction sector is mainly comprised of micro firms and that the perceived CSFs for implementing innovation clusters is significantly different from those identified in the literature. The responses from the firms raises interesting perspectives and questions whether innovation through clustering is a lost cause for micro construction companies.