From Innovation to Impact: Scaling Climate Solutions to Transform Markets

23 March 2026 -  This report sets out how the University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) supports innovation with the potential to reshape markets, and the impact of this work over the past five years.

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About

Across sectors, markets are being reshaped by structural pressures linked to climate change, nature loss and resource constraints. Together, these forces are redefining risk, resilience and long‑term competitiveness. While many commercially viable solutions already exist, too few are reaching scale. This is rarely due to a lack of innovation, but because capital, policy and market systems are not yet aligned.

From Innovation to Impact explains how CISL helps close this gap by working at a system level, bringing together business, finance, policy and academia to create the conditions in which break through solutions can succeed at scale.

Why innovation struggles to scale

Markets are shifting rapidly as climate‑ and nature‑related risks intensify, creating both disruption and opportunity. Organisations increasingly require solutions that can deliver measurable outcomes while remaining commercially viable at scale.

Breakthrough technologies do not succeed on technical performance alone. They scale when incentives, capabilities, norms and rules evolve to support them. This report sets out how CISL focuses not only on advancing innovation, but on shaping the wider market context in which it operates, helping solutions move from early promise to deployment and adoption.

CISL’s systems-based approach

CISL works at the intersection of academia, business, finance and policy to support interventions capable of reshaping entire sectors, rather than isolated projects. Our approach focuses on five mutually reinforcing areas:

  • Diagnosing risks and opportunities to identify interventions that can unlock system change and shape long-term competitiveness
  • Aligning actors across business, finance, policy and innovation to build shared direction and momentum
  • Accelerating uptake, connecting innovators with corporates, investors and decision-makers to test and deploy solutions in real-world settings
  • Strengthening enabling conditions, including regulatory, policy and financial frameworks
  • Reinforcing the ecosystem through access to capital, networks and market insight, including via Canopy and CISL’s global partnerships

Together, these interventions help translate credible innovation into market-wide impact.

Five years of impact

The report marks five years of CISL’s innovation and accelerator activity, including the work of Canopy, CISL’s sustainability innovation community. Over this period, CISL has supported more than 500 startups and early-stage ventures across key sectors.

Explore CISL’s innovation work

To explore CISL’s full innovation offer, including our accelerator programmes, corporate and investor engagement, policy-facing work and the Canopy innovation community, visit our Innovation pages. Innovation | Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL)

Find out more about joining our Canopy innovation community The Canopy CISL