I think the biggest barriers to innovation are the risk of small businesses taking on new technology, which is why I mentioned in my remarks that there's a great opportunity to create programming to help de-risk trying new things. It's not like building a test car and whipping it around the track somewhere; we can't build test houses that cost hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars, and see if they work. What do you do with them afterwards?
There have been government demonstration programs in the past, but even then, when you demonstrate that technology and you have a full-blown, million-dollar house, what do you do with it afterwards if those things don't work?
There is a huge opportunity to create programming. There's a small program at Natural Resources Canada called LEEP, local energy efficiency partnerships, that is very much about helping the building industry. The “L” in LEEP is for local, and it works with local industry to help adopt and try new technologies, test them out, and then feed back to the manufacturers to help them improve by saying what the problems were during installing, what worked and what didn't work, but it's a risk.
People say that homebuilders are risk averse, but homebuilders have the biggest risk appetites of almost any business going. It is such a risky business that your job is to mitigate risk constantly. Bringing in new technologies is a new risk, and you need some help in making sure that they work well and that you can trial them.