Roadmap to Transform the Canadian Construction Industry

Canada’s construction sector is facing a critical moment. Productivity has stagnated for decades, the skilled labour force is shrinking, and housing demand continues to outpace supply, especially in remote and underserved communities. While Industrialized Construction (IC) offers a promising solution, its adoption has been slow due to fragmented policies, financial barriers, inconsistent terminology, and a lack of coordinated research and implementation strategies. The central challenge addressed in this project was the absence of a national, industry-informed strategy to guide innovation and investment in IC. Existing efforts were disjointed, with stakeholders working in silos, lacking shared definitions, standardized data, or a clear roadmap to scale adoption. This project overcame that challenge by developing a collaborative Research and Development (R&D) Roadmap for IC, grounded in the input of over 150 stakeholders from across the country. It identifies barriers, prioritizes actions, and outlines a path forward through targeted policy, procurement reform, workforce development, and a unified national framework. Critically, it establishes the National Research Council (NRC) as a central hub in a “hub and spoke” model to drive R&D with support from regional clusters. By aligning industry, academia, and government under a shared vision and language, the roadmap fills a long-standing gap and provides the structure needed to unlock the full potential of IC in Canada.

The solution developed a national Research and Development (R&D) Roadmap for Industrialized Construction (IC), which provides a structured, actionable path to overcome the key barriers preventing the adoption and scaling of IC in Canada. Informed by over 120 stakeholders from across the construction value chain, this roadmap outlines six critical focus areas: policy and regulatory reform, procurement innovation, financial and insurance solutions, awareness and competency building, quantifying capacity and capability, and research and data sharing. By identifying specific initiatives within each area, complete with implementation timelines, key stakeholders, and measurable outcomes, the roadmap transforms a fragmented innovation landscape into a coordinated national strategy. It introduces a “hub and spoke” model, where the National Research Council (NRC) serves as the central coordinating hub through a new Centre of Excellence (CoE), working alongside regional research clusters. This structure ensures that local innovations feed into a unified national system, enabling collective learning and avoiding duplication of efforts. Crucially, the roadmap calls for the adoption of a common framework that defines IC categories, terminology, and performance metrics, creating a shared language across the sector. Without this foundation, policy alignment, data consistency, and cross-sector collaboration would remain unachievable. Together, these components create the enabling environment needed to scale IC nationally by aligning stakeholders, guiding investment, informing regulation, and supporting workforce development. It is not just a plan, but a platform for transformation.