Solutions and Innovation

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.

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)
• Dr Aleksandra Przydrozna, Global Retrofit Lead, Mace
• 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
• Emily Barrett, Corporate Innovation Director, Sustainable Ventures
• Francesco Pomponi, Co-Founder and CSO, Preoptima
• Gillian Brown, Senior Manager – Sustainable Design, Lloyds Banking Group
• Hayley Newman, Associate Director – Sustainability, MAPP
• Ian Fuller, Director, BL3 Consulting
• Jack Wardale, Director, EcoBuild Advisory (EBA)
• Juliana Calabria-Holley, Lecturer, University of Bath
• Kingma Ma, Managing Director UK, Proptech1 Ventures
• Lydia Dutton, Director – Regional Sustainability Lead, CBRE
• Marion Delaney, Adviser, Hydrock
• Matt Mason, Head of Innovation, The Crown Estate
• Monica Donaldson-Balan, Associate Building Physics Engineer, Mott MacDonald
• Natasha Terinova, Partner, REACH UK
• Nic Crawley, Technical Director, Building Performance Group (Property & Buildings), WSP
• Paloma Hermoso, Pre Construction Manager, Passivhaus and Retrofit Lead, Whitebox Construction Management | WWA
• Patrick Dumas, Founder & CEO, Square Mile Farms
• Phanos Hadjikyriakou, Co-Founder & CEO, 2050 Materials Holding
• Romain Richli, Head of Climate and Environment, Bouygues
• Sam Szczurek, Innovation Lead, Places for London
• Snigdha Jain, Head of ESG, Turley
• Tha’er Abdalla, Senior Consultant, Cundall Johnston and Partners
• Tim Forman, Partner and Founder, Undivided Ventures
• Victoria Burrows, Strategic Partnerships & Insights, KOMPAS VC
• Victoria Turner Browne, Intermediate Mechanical Engineering Consultant, chapmanbdsp
• Vinola Sri Anjana Nattamai Ekanathan, Sustainability Consultant, Mott MacDonald

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.