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.

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.

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.

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.

Innovative Start-Up Forum

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

Innovation Events

Regular solution showcases and innovation networking events.

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.

Solutions & Innovation Advisory Group

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

  • Andy Doyle, Innovation Director, Grosvenor
  • Ankita Dwivedi, Founder & CEO, Firstplanit
  • Catriona Hyland, Research & Investments, A/O PropTech
  • Chloe Goulding, Senior Structural Engineer, Arup
  • Georgina Dowling, Senior Director – Head of Sustainability, Impact Assessment & Social Value, CBRE CBRE
  • Hayley Newman, Associate Director – Sustainability, MAPP
  • Ian Fuller, Head of Sustainability, ISG
  • Joseph Seal-Driver, Commercial Director, Sustainable Ventures
  • Matthew Myers, Associate, Undivided Ventures
  • Kingma Ma, Head of UK, PropTech1
  • Matteo Deidda, Senior Sustainability Manager, People & Places, Lloyds Banking Group
  • Oliver Novakovic, Technical and Innovation Group Director, Barratt Developments
  • Phanos Hadjikyriakou, Co-Founder & CEO, 2050 Materials
  • Phil Pearson, Director, Savills
  • Sam Szczurek, Sustainable Innovation Lead, Transport For London
  • Tania Jennings, Net Zero Carbon Manager, Lewisham Council
  • Valentina Shegoyan, Managing Partner, REACH UK

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.

Discover innovation

Related resources

Events