Building the Market — Forge the Institutions for Low-Carbon Construction

A four-round, advanced systems-change simulation set inside Verdebuild Alliance, a London-based not-for-profit market-builder founded in 2024 to create a functioning UK market for low-carbon structural building materials (mass timber, low-clinker cement, recycled-steel systems). The technology already works — but the market does not: buyers cannot verify low-carbon claims, insurers will not underwrite unfamiliar systems, lenders will not finance them, and no shared standard lets supply and demand find each other. On 12 October 2026 the flagship mass-timber tower is halted three weeks before completion when its insurer withdraws cover, citing the absence of an agreed fire-and-durability standard; the press runs 'Green-build dream goes up in (theoretical) smoke'; and the funders make the next GBP 4M tranche contingent on proving, within 12 months, that a real market is forming — measured by ≥25 active ecosystem participants, an adopted standard, and ≥GBP 75M of committed private capital. Playing the Ecosystem Director with a 14-person team, GBP 6.5M of catalytic funding over three years, and legitimacy as the scarce resource, you (1) diagnose why the market does not exist — naming the binding institutional gap (the standard-and-underwriting blocker) rather than behaving like a product company that 'just promotes the timber'; (2) choose the highest-leverage gap to fill first and sequence the rest along the dependency chain standard → insurance → finance, instead of attacking everything at once with too few people; (3) recruit a coalition in the right order (anchor manufacturer, lead developer, the insurer who walked away, the regulator as legitimiser), neutralise the rival proprietary proto-standard, and set an open-vs-proprietary stance whose legitimacy is co-produced; and (4) mobilise catalytic capital that crowds in private finance, set the 12-month formation metrics, and defend a funder-ready scorecard to the lead funder and development-bank investment committee. The math rewards genuine, sequenced, coalition-built, open-standard market formation with crowded-in private capital, and punishes the six classic errors — product-marketing the technology, fixing every gap at once, authoring a standard with no buy-in, accepting proprietary capture for a quick win, mobilising grants instead of private capital, and claiming a market on one signed MOU. Final KPIs track Ecosystem Participants (toward ≥25), Standard Legitimacy (0–100), Private Capital Mobilised (toward ≥GBP 75M), and Catalytic Budget used against the GBP 6.5M cap.