A 6-Point Roadmap to Integrating Innovation in Housing

Driven by many factors, from labor shortages and rising building costs to production delays and inefficiencies, production builders are looking to innovate across their organizations to streamline processes, bring down costs, and improve marketability and profitability.

But while an increasing number of those builders report having dedicated departments and staff for research and development efforts, and perennially report “operational efficiencies” as a primary business goal, relatively few actually pull the trigger to integrate innovation that has meaningful impact.

There are legitimate reasons for this disconnect, ranging from risk-reward calculations to regulatory barriers, consumer perceptions and preferences, and push-back from higher-ups and trade partners, to name a few. And yet, through collaboration and shared goals, innovation can happen.

Consider the story shared by Kerri Paulino at the Housing Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh earlier this year, where the president for the Greenville, SC division of Meritage Homes and others at Meritage initiated an innovation project in partnership with MiTek, an industry software and building solutions company, and 84 Lumber, a leading materials supplier, to pilot a panelized framing system.

“I was a yes from the beginning because I had seen [panelization], I had experienced it,” she recalled from her time at NVR, a large-production home builder, where that method is the norm. “Until I left NVR, I didn't realize that everyone else was still stick-framing, and to this day I don't understand how or why. It doesn't make any sense to me. There is a better way.”

In addition to driving down cycle time and eventually costs, the project team saw a tremendous potential benefit by standardizing the placement of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing locations for every house. Factory-drilled runs in the framing enabled trade partners to execute with greater precision and consistently, and with less skilled labor.

“The big goal is to standardize construction so it's repetitive, so it speeds up time, not just during the frame or pre-frame, but also post-frame,” she says. “It's been the most complex, advanced home we've built.”

She and others at the three-day summit were dedicated to seeing complex, higher-risk/higher-reward innovations, from off-site construction to AI to new materials, break down barriers and enter the mainstream. Their insights and ideas offer this 6-point roadmap to realizing that reality.

1. Know The Problem

Before integrating any innovation, be it artificial intelligence (AI) applications, off-site construction, or a high-performance material, “You need to think about what problem you’re solving for your customer,” says Kevin Line, director of technology at Rise Building Products, which applies synthetic fiber technology to make exterior trim and siding.

When Rise came across “basically free” feedstock of polyester, nylon, and fiberglass materials destined for landfills, the company didn’t have exterior cladding—or any product—in mind for that material.

Instead, they asked themselves what problem could they solve with it, eventually leading to a new category of siding and trim that it now sells exclusively through CertainTeed.

His advice for innovators and those looking to adopt it? “Look for problems to solve and opportunities to solve them.”

2. Deputize a Champion

“If you want to integrate innovation, you’re going to need a champion,” says Paulino. If you think sending an email will do it, she adds, it’s never going to happen. “You are going to need someone that will stand on the table and jump up and down to get us all to stop and listen and think.”

Among all builders that responded to Pro Builder’s Top 200 survey this year, 34% reported having a dedicated research & development (R&D) or innovation department and a dedicated team or person leading it, up from 25% the year before.

“I wouldn't be surprised if we get to 50% by 2030,” says Dejan Eskic, the director of research and education at Ivory Innovations and a senior research fellow and scholar at the University of Utah, who analyzed the data. “The pressure is already there (to innovate), and there will be more and more builders looking seriously at it.”

Among the largest home builders (those earning more than $1 billion in housing revenue) , that percentage jumps to 67%; for the next tier ($500-$999 million), it’s 39%, and 29% for smaller-volume builders—all of those numbers up from a year ago.

“That’s really important and makes me happy because as the big fish are innovating and have deeper pockets to invest in innovation, the little guys are catching on and figuring out how to deploy innovation, too.”

Regardless of size, though, integrating innovation requires a plan. “And it can't be in theory,” says Paulino. “We need to understand how to do it, the cost, the impact on our business. An execution plan has to make it easy to say yes and implementing it."

3. Analyze the Value Proposition

A critical element of that plan, adds Paulino, is articulating the value proposition, from soup to nuts (and bolts), based on three criteria: Is it cheaper, faster, or better ... and ideally more than one of those.

“The first one (cheaper) is easy. We all understand that, dollar-for-dollar, it is either a less-expensive product or a less-expensive process,” she says.

“The most opportunity for game-changing technologies are the ones that are cost competitive,” adds Joshua Henry, the co-founder and chief product and environmental officer at Timber HP, North America’s first manufacturer of wood fiber insulation. “Not just on a materials basis, but on the install basis."

The next value prop assessment is whether an innovation reduces build time. “That’s a big piece of what we're analyzing when we're talking about innovation,” Paulino says.

Reducing time to market saves money by minimizing carrying costs and interest charges, among other ongoing expenses, while potentially allowing fewer construction managers to oversee more homes, increasing inventory turns, and generating faster cash flow from sales.

Lastly, is it better? “A lot of the innovations we see promise their widget is better than another widget,” Paulino says. "That's great, but what we need to understand is whether and how we get revenue out of it.”

For instance, if an innovation costs $50 more than the current spec or process, but customers will pay $250 for it, that’s compelling.

“Or if it’s the same cost as what’s currently specified, does it provide some sizzle on the sales side and sell more quickly?” she says. “We need to understand a very clear value proposition.”

While all those questions—and more—are essential to making an change pencil out, the process also threatens new ideas from coming to reality and scale to be truly effective. “The enemy of innovation is complexity,” says Paulino.

4. Form Partnerships

The consensus among Summit attendees is that innovation doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it requires cooperation, mutual benefits, and partnerships to succeed, and especially when considering operation-wide change.

“Construction's a complex, often silo’d industry,” says John Harding, Offsite Construction Business Development Program Manager at CertainTeed. “Collaboration between manufacturers, builders, and architects is critical if we want to create truly resilient homes, and we need to improve those conversations.”

Volumetric Building Companies (VBC) is a vertically integrated company that has designed, engineered, manufactured. and delivered more than 5,600 modular units for various housing, healthcare, and hospitality projects.

Even so, the company benefits from collaborating with external partners to conjure and implement innovative solutions for both sides.

“Putting money into integrating a whole bunch of different companies and kind of crowdsource issues and try to solve them is really the wave of the future,” says Sara Logan, the chief design officer at VBC, thus sharing the R&D load and cost. “We've been helped out by some big-name companies, but we're also by very small operations that are bringing their innovations to helping us solve problems.”

“I guarantee that if you look around, you'll find innovative companies somewhere in this space that have a solution, or maybe have a part of a solution, coming together with builders, customers, and contractors to identify issues and then working together in very close proximity to really finalize what that product looks like,” says Line.

He speaks from personal experience. Early on at Rise, the company leveraged relationships with a few key distributors that benefitted both parties.

“They spent a lot of time in the field with us, where we would work out how the installation should go and expose any issues,” he recalls. “And then they would come to the factory and work really closely with us [in product development].”

The collaboration gave Rise opportunities to improve its products and their distributors a better line of sight on supply chain and installer aspects.  

"I think that any new material, any new product, any new solution has to spend a lot of time in the field with the customer before going at scale,” he adds. “You’ll find lots of ways to improve what we're doing along the way.”

5. Prove It

As Rise was rolling out its new product to a few small and medium-sized builders in the Midwest, "There was a whole host of folks that really wanted to see the product ahead of time before they even got to use it,” says Line. “But more importantly, they wanted to see it in practice, with a little bit of age on it.

To add that age, Line suggests finding or initiating test beds and demonstration homes and places where potential customers could see a product in application and put their hands on it.

“That would go a long way in helping in gaining traction in the market and getting it out into the field,” he says. “That would be extraordinary for a whole lot of products.”

For its part and products, Rise operates a product trial lab within its factory.

“We build an entire wall outside where we put product up. If we’re dissatisfied with it, we take it down and put new product up. And then as we evolve, we see that product get better and better,” he says. “We know that if you ship one person in a community a product and it doesn't work, nobody there will buy it. I really took that to heart.”

On a larger innovation scale, while modular construction has found increasing traction in multifamily and non-residential projects, it remains stuck on the fringes of the single-family home building sector.

But Logan sees that changing. “Fifteen years ago, you almost had to hide the fact that you were building with volumetric or a panelized system, or anything like that, and especially If you had a luxury product,” she says.

Now, with increasing pressures on build times and costs, especially for entry-level housing, as well as greater capacity and applied technologies among providers like VBC, “We’re seeing projects that we've built going up right next door to a stick-built product in half the time and seeing them turn and sold faster than their competitors,” she says. "I think if you can get people thinking that there really isn't a ton of difference [in how a house looks or lives], that’s what's going to increase adoption.”

6. Invest in Training

Once the claims of a given innovation have proved legit and given the green light to integrate into the operation, the next step is to make sure the field is prepared to implement it.

“We’re often asked by builders why we don’t just start a company to install our products, and my answer is always that we probably wouldn't do a better job than the subcontractors they already have,” says Henry.

But where Timber HP can be helpful, he says, is to put someone on a site of a major development to help trade partners along, “Almost a project manager to make sure that part of construction goes smoothly and efficiently,” he says.

Logan advocates investments in software, people, and training programs that explain things to people in their own language and in the amount they can consume, “The way they want to be trained,” she says.

For instance, VBC has found that certain installers respond to and retain information best from video, while drawings resonate with others, “And certain teams keep challenging us to give Ikea-like instructions,” she adds.

The 2025 Housing Innovation Summit was held in Pittsburgh, Pa., attracting builders, design professionals, start-up and established product and materials manufacturers, academia, researchers, and other housing industry stakeholders. Go to the Housing Innovation Alliance website for related content and information about the 2026 Summit.