Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Built Environment is part of a Foresight initiative leveraging data from technology companies and other key stakeholders to map, categorize, and analyze strategically important industry value chains for Canada in the clean economy.
Challenges and Opportunities in Decarbonizing Canada's Built Environment Sector
Decarbonizing Canada’s built environment, a sector responsible for around 13 per cent of the country’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2023 (18 per cent when factoring in electricity-related emissions), simultaneously poses significant challenges and transformative economic opportunities. There is an urgent need to invest in the research, development, and commercialization of clean technologies in this sector now. Bolstered by growing demand, the number of companies working to deploy clean technologies across the built environment value chain continues to grow.
Mapping technology innovators in the built environment sector helps shape strategy by highlighting where Canadian companies are driving progress and seizing growth opportunities. This edition of Foresight’s Ventures to Value Chains (V2VC) initiative aims to provide insights to our Helix-5™ partners on areas of strength for Canada, as well as opportunities for growth, by leveraging data we have collected on Canada’s built environment technology companies.
The report identifies regional and topical clusters of companies and potential innovation trends, while also referencing the existing body of work in the built environment sector to provide additional context. Although these findings reflect only a snapshot of the current technology ecosystem, this installment of Foresight’s V2VC initiative aims to contribute to the evolving dialogue on innovation in the built environment and provide insights on possible areas where Canada can build on its strengths and underline opportunities for growth.
This report is available for download. Submit this form for access.
The Value Chain
The built environment technology value chain describes the steps from the harvest and extraction of natural resources for construction materials to end-of-life, by outlining a series of processing steps and inputs and outputs. This value chain is intended to represent the cyclical lifecycle aligned with sustainable engineering, design, and construction processes.
Companies
201 companies are assigned to Canada’s built environment sector value chain. The top two VC steps with the highest number of companies assigned are in the downstream and operations stage of the value chain: electrical components (72) and controls & energy management (55).
The midstream of the value chain represents around one-third of the mapped steps: low-carbon construction materials (41), and sustainable design and engineering (50).
Our data and analysis indicate and discuss trends and clustering, areas of strength, and potential opportunities for growth. Some of the key takeaways include:
- Ontario (72), British Columbia (53), and Quebec (33) are the most represented provinces.
- British Columbia is strongest in low-carbon construction materials production and building envelope.
- Nova Scotia is the most represented Atlantic province.
- Smart home systems and energy management technologies have relatively high adoption rates in Canada, driven by rising electricity costs and renewable energy integration that incentivize monitoring energy consumption.
- There are few companies working in sustainable deconstruction, redevelopment, and demolition. This can be attributed to Canadian regulations that currently do not incentivize sustainable redevelopment or deconstruction.
Why is this important?
Foresight’s venture acceleration programming emphasizes the importance of understanding your value chain.
Knowing where a company fits along the value chain, which companies or technologies come before or after, who the competitors are, and where trends are happening geographically is critical information for ventures, industry, and investors to understand.
This information is also highly important for governments to identify areas of strength, gaps, and opportunities in the innovation landscape, pinpoint areas for targeted support and where targeted R&D and project funding will deliver the greatest return on investment for Canada’s communities and environment.
The Canada’s Ventures to Value Chains: Built Environment web map and analysis report are invaluable tools intended to provide the Helix-5™ ecosystem unique insights into the landscape of Canadian innovation in this space.
Interested in learning more about Canada’s built environment value chain? Download the full report below.
