Solutions and Innovation

At UKGBC we take a collaborative approach to identify sustainability challenges across the built environment and help source and implement the solutions to them.

Why Solutions & Innovation?

A step change in the sector’s environmental and social impact is needed to achieve UKGBC’s vision for a sustainable built environment. This requires innovation in technology, business models and ways of operating, but our sector is often called out for being slow to innovate.

Both developing new innovations, and more widely implementing existing solutions, are critical to achieving global sustainability goals and reaching net zero. However, fragmentation across our industry is holding back the sharing of knowledge and preventing the uptake of solutions at necessary speed and scale.

To address this, UKGBC’s Solutions & Innovation workstream develops and delivers various activities in order to:

  • Source and profile market-ready solutions to sustainability challenges across the built environment.
  • Showcase exemplary case studies of UKGBC members’ work.
  • Help nurture growing start-ups, providing market insight and a strong peer community.
  • Facilitate connections and collaboration across the innovation ecosystem.
  • Build an understanding of key trends and opportunities around innovation.

Get Involved

Solutions Library

UKGBC’s Solutions Library highlights exemplary and commercially available technologies, products, business/financial models (etc) that address common sustainability challenges across the built environment.
Explore

Case Study Library

UKGBC’s Case Study Library showcases projects worked on by UKGBC members that demonstrate exemplary practice across one or several of our impact areas, highlighting key learnings and innovative approaches.
Explore

Trends & Research

Continuously tracking key trends in sustainable solutions and innovation, talking to both solution-providers and the adopting industry to map out the built environment innovation ecosystem.
Read our 2023 Trends Report

Innovative Start-Ups

UKGBC has an expanding community of start-ups working to develop and scale innovative solutions to the array of challenges faced in pursuit of a sustainable built environment.
Find out more

Innovative Start-Up Forum

We regularly bring our Innovative Start-Up members together with UKGBC’s wider membership to knowledge-share.
Discover the Forum

Innovation Events

Regular solution showcases and innovation networking events.
Events calendar

Industry Challenges and Trends

UKGBC continually runs events, forums and meetings with various members and stakeholders. We are collating an ever-expanding database of key challenges faced by the industry, identified through our workstreams. This helps us to understand areas in which solutions are currently lacking, to target our research and innovation activities.

We have also previously run our own internal innovation challenges, resulting in the below Innovation Insights Reports:

Across the year, we also track key trends in solutions and innovation across the built environment, and horizon-scan for future areas of interest.

Read our 2023 Trends Report

Solutions & Innovation Advisory Scheme

Our Advisory Scheme helps evaluate content for UKGBC’s Solutions Library and provides market insight to UKGBC’s Innovative Start-Up Members:

  • Agnes Sadler, Sustainability Lead, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA)
  • Andres Guzman, Head of ESG, Europe, Tishman Speyer Properties (UK)
  • Ankita Dwivedi, CEO & Co-Founder, Firstplanit
  • Catriona Hyland, Investment Research Analyst, A/O PropTech
  • Eliot Powell, Sustainability Consultant, Troup Bywaters + Anders LLP
  • Elliot Marsden, UKIMEA Region Manager, Arup Ventures
  • Francesco Pomponi, Co-Founder and CSO, Preoptima
  • Hayley Newman, Associate Director – Sustainability, MAPP
  • Ian Fuller, Head of Sustainability, ISG
  • Jack Wardale, Director, EcoBuild Advisory (EBA)
  • Joseph Seal-Driver, Commercial Director, Sustainable Workspaces (Sustainable Bridges CIC)
  • Juliana Calabria-Holley, Lecturer, University of Bath
  • Katie Smart, Principal Sustainability Consultant, Hoare Lea
  • Kingma Ma, Managing Director UK, Proptech1 Ventures
  • Lydia Dutton, Director – Regional Sustainability Lead, CBRE
  • Matt Mason, Head of Innovation, The Crown Estate
  • Matteo Deidda, Senior Sustainability Manager, Lloyds Banking Group
  • Natasha Terinova, Director, REACH UK
  • Paloma Hermoso, Associate Partner & Retrofit Lead, Ward Williams Associates
  • Patrick Dumas, Founder & CEO, Square Mile Farms
  • Phanos Hadjikyriakou, Co-Founder & CEO, 2050 Materials Holding
  • Sam Szczurek, Innovation Lead, Places for London
  • Tim Forman, Partner and Founder, Undivided Ventures

Encouraging Innovative Ideas

UKGBC’s Future Leaders Programme, run by our Learning and Leadership Team seeks to convene rising starts from across the industry around key sustainability challenges to develop new ideas.

UKGBC’s Solutions & Innovation team assist in defining challenges for the Future Leaders Programme and profiling the innovative concepts that arise.

We also put forward several of our innovation start-up and investor/accelerator members as speakers throughout the course.

Learn more about Future Leaders

Discover innovation

Future opportunity

Innovative Start-Up Forum

UKGBC is convening its Innovative Start-Up Members with representatives from across the built environment value chain to discuss solutions to challenges and enable better collaboration.
Ongoing Forum
Forum
Birmingham Innovation roundtable

Related resources

Events