Barriers and enablers to scaling sustainable solutions

Publisher: UK Green Building Council (UKGBC).

The named failure mode: “pilotisation”

Pilots that lack a defined route to portfolio-wide adoption or clear success criteria — they exist to generate PR, not to scale.

Barrier categories

Financial (cost of capital, no scale-up finance), organizational (risk-averse cultures, fragmented decision-making, misaligned procurement), and market-based (weak demand signals, no insurance/warranty frameworks to de-risk).

The headline conclusion

“The sector doesn’t need more isolated pilots, it needs coordinated action to bring proven solutions into mainstream use” — a direct statement, from a credible trade body rather than an outside critic, that demonstration-building strategy alone is insufficient.

Why it matters for this archive

The “official industry admission” that demonstration-project strategy has structural limits — gives this KB’s existing barriers analysis (see Why hasn’t passive thermal scaled?) a precise, citable name — “pilotisation” — for a failure mode it was already describing informally. See Promoting passive thermal technology.