Um, doesn't thin margins mean generally mean the industry is mature and most things have been tried? I guess if you hold constant the "degree of difficult" for innovation, then large <i>revenue</i> make an industry "ripe for innovation". But this applies just as well to Apple, right? A 1% increase in efficiency in a $100 billion industry nets the same profits, regardless of the existing margins. Or am I misunderstanding?
There's a long path-not-taken on housing. Most things in our society have gotten a lot cheaper per unit service in the past hundred years or so, including many entirely new categories of services. Housing has stubbornly resisted change, with the result that an ever-larger portion of our culture's capital is tied up in providing housing. And housing hasn't gotten any more useful, either.<p><a href="http://hexayurt.com" rel="nofollow">http://hexayurt.com</a> gives some notion of how radical that shift could be when it arises. Industrial panels (of whatever kind) directly into owner-build housing. Free Hardware. You may laugh, but half the world lives in cinderblock-and-tin-roof shacks and worse.<p>Nobody said the innovation had to start here, or look like what we do now.
A formula for disrupting Construction in the United States:<p>* Pre-fabricate everything<p>* Assemble onsite using non-union labor<p>* Move away from "Cost-Plus" pricing structures<p>Construction has Razor Thin Margins for a number of reasons, not the least of them being the incentives associated with Cost-Plus bidding. Non-Union labor and Pre-fab would literally upend the industry.<p>The problem, as with most mature industries, is policy-based and not technical in nature.<p>Construction is as ripe for Innovation as Medicine, and an equally difficult water to navigate.
This is half plug and half relevant to the article, I like to think we're worth knowing about.<p>I work for Ekotrope[1], we're looking to make those margins bigger and help build green at the same time. Believe it or not, they're not mutually exclusive and we know how to make it happen.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.ekotrope.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.ekotrope.com</a>
I don't understand the focus on margins. While bigger margins would be nice, it seems like modular construction would have a more direct effect on turnover rather than margins. Maybe the term "profitability" would be more accurate.
Disruption may be in finding gold where others see garbage, like the Banana King did: <a href="http://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/you-could-be-the-next-banana-king/" rel="nofollow">http://cbpowerandindustrial.wordpress.com/2013/04/10/you-cou...</a>