Green start-up companies develop innovative products and services that address environmental challenges for use by businesses and consumers, helping economies become more sustainable, efficient and competitive. However, they face important development challenges surrounding high capital requirements, long development timelines, policy and market uncertainty, complex regulations, and externalities affecting investment into green technologies. Government policy plays an important role in unlocking the potential of green entrepreneurship by helping green start‑ups to overcome these various obstacles.
This report presents the key findings and recommendations from an OECD project to advise the Canadian government on the development of policies to drive the creation and growth of green start-ups based on international policy experiences. It discusses the key policy issues in green entrepreneurship promotion internationally, benchmarks data on green entrepreneurship rates across OECD countries, and provides an assessment of Canada’s green entrepreneurial ecosystem and support policies to identify key development bottlenecks and support gaps. International good practice policies from four other OECD countries (Australia, Denmark, Portugal and the United States) are also analysed to identify transferable policy lessons. A set of policy recommendations are offered for Canada.
