Challenges of sustainability business innovation in built environment

The climate mitigation is one of the greatest challenges of sustainability society. It has boosted the fastest growing new investment market in the world with 140 billion dollars yearly investments. The new market offers huge opportunities for sustainability business innovations. Inside the market, the built environment is assessed to offer wide scope of the most cost efficient opportunities. Paradoxically, most of the new sustainability innovations seem to come from other industries. The study was set to investigate what is the current approach in the real estate and construction industry to produce sustainability business innovation and why it does not seem to produce new innovation with required speed. Nearly a hundred innovation projects in the industry are reviewed and compared against the features of successful innovation processes. Unexpectedly, the results show that sustainability innovations process in the built environment seems to lack some key component of an innovation process. The sustainability innovation processes in real estate and construction industries were actually found to resemble traditional R&D processes instead of innovation processes. In the future, the sustainability business model development in the built environment should focus on innovation approaches and ensure that all the essential components of successful innovation development are in place.

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