We have launched a new pilot process for crowdsourcing solutions to the industry’s shared challenges and are now calling on you to share your knowledge of game changing technologies, services, policies, and business and financial models.

Amongst all the chaos of 2020, two things have kept happening: the world keeps warming and organisations keep making net zero carbon commitments. For evidence on the former I simply offer you a look out the window (is it a heatwave or a storm today?) or see the recently published Met Office “State of the UK Climate” and for the latter I point you to our refreshed Climate Commitment Platform.

It’s fantastic to see a steady increase in ambitious carbon reduction targets and the other good news is that many of the solutions we need already exist. The problem is that they aren’t common knowledge or well understood and we don’t have time to individually search them out or start from scratch creating new solutions. In the next nine years, we need to halve the energy use of the UK’s buildings and help the world halve global carbon emissions.

That is why we are putting a renewed focus on helping the industry identify solutions to shared challenges, starting with how to drastically reduce the carbon emissions of buildings. We are now piloting a process for sourcing and evaluating potential solutions, but we cannot do this alone. We need built environment professionals from the UK and beyond to share their knowledge so that we can amplify the rate of change.

So please submit your solution suggestions, and review those of others, by participating in our pilot project. We have launched the challenges, and are crowd-sourcing solutions to them, using the new Microsoft Teams Ideas Ideation platform, a web and app-based idea management tool. We are crowdsourcing solutions until Friday 18th September, at which time the pilot challenges will close and solutions will be selected for further evaluation and potential inclusion in a solutions publication. Once we have assessed the success of this pilot we hope to run a number of challenges through the solutions process. For further information on the pilot see here.

Challenge Statement 1
“How can a building owner improve their existing buildings, with as little physical intervention as possible, to achieve net zero operational carbon by 2030?”

Challenge Statement 2
“How can office owners and occupiers improve the connection between live building occupancy and the control of building services, to reduce operational energy consumption?”

If you would like to submit a solution and access the portal, please complete one of the below forms:

Non-members are required to submit a solution for review before access to the platform is granted.

We are undertaking several other activities to help increase the adoption of innovative solutions, including through the recent publication of an Open Innovation Levels Framework to guide corporates on how to engage in open innovation and reach effective solutions. We are also co-hosting the Reimagining Real Estate Sustainability Summit on October 8th, and we have set up a special Innovative Start-up membership option at just £105, through which we have welcomed almost 20 innovative start-ups this year.

The challenge of climate change is too great for any of our organisations to tackle alone, so please join the pilot platform, upload solutions, assess what others have suggested, and let us know what you think of the process.

For more information please contact Innovation@ukgbc.org.

Related