The Anatomy of a Demonstration Project
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 October 2022
This chapter develops the economics theory of demonstration projects and then investigates the role of one demonstration project – the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design – at lowering information barriers for the adoption of innovative energy and environmental technologies. The KBISD demonstration project allows us to observe the formation of a network around a demonstration project and how attitudes and behaviors relating to environmental technologies permeate and disseminate throughout the network. This section presents results from an industry-wide survey as well as several dozen semi-structured interviews related to the KBISD. The interviews reveal motivations, challenges, innovations, costs, and risks associated with participation in a demonstration project, as well as key differences between this living building approach and design–bid–build approaches often employed in traditional buildings.It finds that, while working on the building was not affiliated with increased levels of technology familiarity prior to building construction, being affiliated with the US Green Building Council is highly correlated with increased knowledge of emergent technologies. This points to professional knowledge networks as having a key role in disseminating information regarding emergent technologies.
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