Startups in the construction and materials industry in the Canary Islands: the new business models

In the Spanish Government’s Spain’s Strategy Entrepreneur Nation, the construction and materials industry is an entrepreneur field with a wide range of possibilities at innovation. “The construction industry needs to integrate processes of innovation applied to a faster, more secure, and with less environmental impact way of constructing, leaning on technologies like BIM, the use of drones or modular or prefabricated elements. By means of energetic efficiency, fields like refurbishment, renovation or new buildings seek sustainability, as well as an enhancement in their profitability as estate businesses”.

 The innovation of the materials is part of the answer to the challenges that the transformation of this field is facing as a whole. The possibilities widen with the materials integrated computational engineering, 3D or 4D characterisation, additive manufacturing, etc. The development of new materials or the discovery of new properties of the traditional materials leads to a more efficient use of natural resources and provides new options for constructing.

For example, the advanced materials with multifunctional appliances allow to group different properties in one material; the composed materials allow to obtain better capacities—thermal, electrical and fire resistance capacities—through techniques, such as injection, infusion, pultrusion or the consolidation of the pre-impregnated; and metal alloys, light, or high-resistance ones.

The integration of technology creates opportunities in fields like the intelligent automatization (in the case of home automation), and allows the use of systems to manage energy or the use of other services, e.g., services for security against access, activity tracking, etc.

To facilitate access to housing, whether it is for rent or sale, or to reach the balance in estate supply and demand, are challenges that the nowadays’ society is facing. People’s lifestyle or work style and the new family models condition the already existing business models or property models. At present, there can be found initiatives adapted to single-parent families, joint custody or single people.

The co-living and co-housing tendencies for adults, families or young people who bet on collaborative housing, either for rent or for sale, join the already existing idea of timesharing.

Public entrepreneur function and work tendering

In the Spanish Government’s Spain’s Strategy Entrepreneur Nation, they fix the function of a public entrepreneur Function “with the creation of innovation programmes within a public Administration”. Its objective will be to foster the innovative mindset and the entrepreneurship within the public employees, the pursuit of opportunities for collaboration with innovative companies and the leadership of changes within the Administration itself“.

Among their lines of action, there will be promotion of continuous training for public employees, dissemination of good practices, fostering of proactivity, guidance to citizens and service vocation. Innovative public employees will be identified, so that they can act as agents of change, and there will be activities and idea contests, knowledge exchange and stays in other fields of the Administration organized.

The Government of the Canary Islands itself counts with the Quality and Technology Lab of Public Works and Edification. “This service leads actions that, maybe, we could describe as institutional entrepreneurship based on harnessing of, for instance, volcano ashes, to generate, for example, building blocks. There is a lawful command that in those buildings where the waste materials weigh more than 50 tons, they need to be recycled. Some of the projects that we’re implementing use those construction waste materials: rubbles, concrete, tiles…” recently claimed Gustavo Santana, Vice-Counsellor of Infrastructures and Transport of the Government of the Canary Islands in an interview with Impulsa Startups.

Another regional initiative allows startups in the field of 3D impression in health, water or agri to use the new resources of the Institute of Technology of the Canary Islands (ITC). With over 5,381 square metres in surface and an investment close to a million euros in cutting-edge equipment, this industrial machining and advanced electromechanics centre, which is specialized since 1999 in the additive manufacturing of porous titanium implants for bone reconstruction and which currently counts with more than 350 interventions in humans (personalized 3D design) and more than 20,0000 devices implemented in veterinary medicine (mass production), broadens their mechanical precision manufacturing capacities to functional pieces of high added value and prototype, bigger size and made with new materials (aluminium, steel, Inconel…). The ITC reinforces their capacity in terms of additive manufacturing and electromechanics in relation to the local industry.

According to the last report published by Seopan, Association of Constructing and Infrastructure Concessionary Businesses, the public work tendering in Spain reached through 2021 the 23,648.352 million euros, a 68% more than in 2020 and a 29,6% more than in 2019, being the last pre-pandemic year.

Construction Tech Startup Forum and Rebuild

From April 26 to April 28 in Ifema, Madrid, there took place a new edition of the Construction Tech Startup Forum, a scenario that hosted a unique competition at a national level with the startups that are emerging in the construction industry to carry the transformation that it needs, and which was presented at the Contech Startup Map.

Rebuild 2022, the major Technology Summit for the professionals of the construction field in Spain, celebrated its fifth edition, in which all records have been broken: 17,344 attendants, 372 exhibitor companies, 581 international experts in the National Congress of Architecture 4.0. “This appointment has become the most important yearly meeting for the professionals of the whole construction value chain, which this year was presented as more crucial than ever for the geopolitical and economic context in which it has taken place”, claimed the organisers. 

 Translated by Andrea Expósito Santana