Construction invests 0.2% of revenue in research and development. Manufacturing invests 5.1%. Pharmaceutical companies invest nearly 17%. According to OECD data, construction is the least research-intensive industry measured.
This is not just a number about spending. It is a number about the rate at which the sector builds the knowledge it needs to manage its own complexity.
of revenue invested in R&D — the lowest of any industry measured by the OECD. Against 5.1% in manufacturing. Against nearly 17% in pharmaceuticals. The gap is not a rounding error. It is structural. (Source: OECD Research Intensity by Industry, 2018)
Industries that invest heavily in R&D build knowledge faster than their problems grow. They develop better methods, better tools, better frameworks for understanding what they are doing and why. That investment compounds: each cycle of research produces better inputs for the next.
The AEC sector has, for decades, invested at a rate that does not keep pace with the complexity it is being asked to manage. Net zero targets, embodied carbon accounting, planning reform, regulatory change, digital adoption, supply chain fragmentation — the demands on the sector have multiplied. The knowledge infrastructure to meet those demands has not grown at the same rate.
The result is an industry that often responds to new demands by applying old methods — because the investment in developing new ones has not been made. Productivity in construction has barely moved in fifty years. That is not a coincidence.
The aggregate figures describe a structural condition. At the level of individual firms, the gap presents differently. Teams operating without structured innovation practice tend to rediscover the same solutions independently, across projects and offices. Knowledge that should compound instead resets. Expertise that should transfer instead stays locked in the individuals who hold it.
The organisations that manage this best are not necessarily the ones that spend more on R&D in the traditional sense. They are the ones that treat innovation as a management discipline — with structured processes for capturing what is learned, validating what is assumed, and applying what is known to the decisions that matter most.
That is what ISO 56001 addresses at the organisational level. Not a compliance exercise — a framework for making the investment in knowledge work.
The 0.2% figure describes a stock problem as well as a flow problem. It is not just that construction is spending too little on R&D now — it is that this has been the pattern for long enough that the knowledge deficit is structural. The sector’s collective understanding of its own processes, risks, and failure modes is shallower than the complexity of its work demands.
This deficit shows up in predictable places: concept designs that carry unexamined assumptions, innovation initiatives that generate activity without evidence, R&D spending that cannot be articulated because it was never structured. The organisations that begin to close this gap — not with grand programmes, but with proportionate, structured approaches to how they manage knowledge and validate decisions — do not just perform better on individual projects. They compound that advantage over time.
ISO 56001 applied to AEC provides the management framework. It is not a research programme — it is the system that ensures the research that does happen is structured, captured, and applied rather than lost in the noise of delivery pressure.
For organisations that want to understand where they stand before committing to a full programme, the Innovation Practice Review is the starting point. It maps the gap between stated innovation intent and live practice, and identifies where structured effort would generate the most return.