Measuring Cultural Readiness for Construction Innovation: Development and Pilot Validation of the CLEAR-DST Instrument

Construction organisations routinely invest in innovation without first establishing whether the cultural conditions required to sustain it are in place. This paper addresses that diagnostic gap by developing and piloting an organisational culture-led instrument that measures innovation readiness as a primary, validated construct rather than a contextual assumption. A PRISMA-compliant review of twelve construction innovation frameworks establishes the measurement gap. CLEAR-DST (Culture, Leadership, Environment, Architecture, Resources – Decision Support Tool) is developed to assess readiness with organisational culture operationalised through Schein's layered model and embedded within each dimension rather than isolated as a separate factor. The instrument was piloted with 33 experienced construction professionals in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Three of the four subscales returned good internal consistency (α = 0.861 to 0.947; ω marginally exceeding α throughout), whilst Resources fell short (α = 0.759, 95% CI [0.615, 0.865]). Leadership showed redundancy rather than breadth (mean inter-item r = 0.65), and three items (R7, E8, E9) were flagged for removal or revision. Environment and Architecture were weakly distinguished (r = 0.81), an overlap carried forward as a formal hypothesis for the main study. The instrument produced differentiated, interpretable responses, satisfying the conditions for progression to full-scale validation without establishing construct validity.