The housing construction industry in Sweden is fragmented with few major actors dominating the housing market and several local or regional small and medium (SME) sized construction companies. This combined with the SME's lack of resources for knowledge consuming activities such as product development and innovations, creates a super competitive situation for the SME companies. Studies show that innovation and business model are tightly linked to each other. A business model that is robust can be used as foundation for innovation. The business model needs to define the market, partnerships, product attributes meeting market requirements and production parameters such as cost, time and quality, which are all necessary input for achieving product innovation.This paper investigates a SME construction company and its suppliers, initially linked by traditional working agreements, when developing a product collaboratively in order to gain increased market shares, This paper elaborates on whether developing the business model might be a possible key success area for SME construction companies, which might enhance their possibilities in offering a more competitive product to the market. The objective is to find a methodology that is applicable and workable for the SME´s in construction industry and to develop a framework for analysis. The work described in this paper aims at improving our understanding of the SME product development process.The result of the product development project has been a new design process with a business model that has longer contractual agreements rather than short term project procurement.
Godkänd; 2010; 20100923 (jarkko)