Women in Cleantech Challenge

Women in Cleantech Challenge promotes women led businesses by supporting entrepreneurs in cleantech areas to scale their technologies and grow their businesses. It is one of six cleantech challenges in the Impact Canada Cleantech Initiative. NRCan designed the challenges to help address pressing environmental problems. Eligible technologies were those that are able to reach international markets, use fewer inputs, generate less waste and cause less environmental damage than the alternatives. The technologies needed to be between technology readiness level (TRL) 2 and 5 and be potentially “disruptive”, i.e. able to redefine the market for a given service and thereby capture significant market share from incumbent technologies. The three-year challenge to support these women-led business has been completed. It attracted almost 150 entrants, and had 6 finalists and 1 grand prize winner. With the success of the Women in Cleantech Challenge, the delivery partner (MaRS Discovery District) was able to attract private-sector investment to support women entrepreneurs and launched the Women in Cleantech Accelerator with support from the Royal Bank of Canada. This helps support the idea that government programmes can seed organisational capacity building and follow-on private activity to deliver specific policy goals. 

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