The Goal:

Investigate the Canadian market opportunity and business model for a potential new product offering: a content aggregator portal related to climate-change.

The Market Gap

We are in the design and planning phase of a new climate change impact software product (related to "UN Sustainable Development Goal 13: Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts"). The product will produce a set of climate change impact reports in a given geographical area. The primary end users will include municipal government officials and urban planners, insurance companies, non-government organizations, and other stakeholders who are concerned about climate change impacts in their region or industry.

Our initial research indicates that there is a very large and rapidly growing volume of climate-change related reports, guidance, and data sets spread across Canadian government websites. However it can be difficult for end users (their intended audience) to find and use them. We believe that there may be a market gap for a centralized portal (or series of micro-portals) that aggregates and links to the existing climate change content and data published by federal, provincial, municipal, non-government organization, and academic sources.

You can consider the portal might have these features:

• Link to existing published material and data sets from Canadian government websites (municipal, provincial, federal), NGOs, and academic groups
• Search engine to make it easy to find and view the information
• Sections or micro-portals for aggregating and displaying content by region or by industry/topic (example health impacts from climate change vs. coastal erosion/sea-level rise impact; or an Atlantic Canada regional portal)
• Freemium-model: Portal users could access some content for free, and subscribe (pay) for access to specialized content and/or features.
• Subscriber/membership management functionality with different levels of access

Your Contribution

We would like to know if there is a market opportunity for this potential product offering in Canada (only).

If you do identify a market opportunity, we would then like you to investigate the business model for the portal.