An Innovation Platform for Scalable Sustainability

The need for sustainable buildings is urgent, yet most technologies for improving the efficiency of buildings, cities and infrastructure fail to achieve significant deployment in the market. We are not implementing green solutions fast enough to meet sustainability goals. Why?

The average building in the West was constructed 30 years ago and runs on technology 20-30 years old. This makes most business models for sustainability analytics, intelligent buildings, or smart grid completely infeasible to scale due to installation costs.

Our community lacks innovation platforms which (1) enable rapid development of sustainability ideas in the real world and (2) drive down installation costs and improve scalability of those ideas in the market.

A platform is needed which provides a standardized interface and is simple to install regardless of building type. We explore the design principles and features needed for such a system. This platform could rapidly improve the pace of adoption for green technology ideas by providing a solution to entrepreneurs for the scalable development and deployment of their ideas in the physical world, similar to the rapid innovation enabled in the digital world through the Internet and mobile platforms.

The opportunity is enormous. We can achieve most of the IPCC's recommended 45% reduction in emissions by 2030 simply by focusing on buildings. Building this platform for the physical world will kickstart innovation and enable for the first time rapid achievement of global drawdown goals by drastically decreasing the cost of building and deploying innovative sustainability solutions around the world.

Day
Tuesday Poster Session
Authors
John Bohlmann
Daniel Poynter
Related Conference Themes
Built Environment
Electricity Generation