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 often need to respond to important development barriers 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.
One in twenty start-ups in Canada are green start-ups. They are highly beneficial firms making important economic and environmental contributions. To encourage them, there is a range of public financial and non-financial assistance and a rich ecosystem of private and non-governmental support organisations. This report reviews and benchmarks Canada’s green entrepreneurship performance and support system against OECD peer countries and offers advice for the Canadian government on policies to drive the creation and growth of green start-ups.
The first chapter of the report examines key policy issues in green entrepreneurship promotion internationally and discusses definitions and taxonomies for green entrepreneurship. Chapter 2 presents an international quantitative benchmarking of the population and characteristics of green start-ups in Canada and 19 other OECD countries, leveraging data from Crunchbase and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. Chapters 3 and 4 assess Canada’s policies to support green start-ups directly (Chapter 3) and build green entrepreneurial ecosystems (Chapter 4) and identify transferable lessons from the policy experiences of Australia, Denmark, Portugal and the United States. Chapter 5 sets out six key policy recommendations for the Canadian authorities.