A Living Lab for real estate innovation
- The Student Hotel
The Student Hotel is progressive and innovative. With hotel and student accommodation in one, they have created a hugely popular concept. TSH is already succesful in many areas by making their buildings and business operation more sustainable. But it does not stop there: in addition to making their own buildings more sustainable, TSH also wanted to contribute to making the built environment as a whole more sustainable. They asked PHI for capacity, knowledge and the right network to boost the start-up of their Living Lab.
- Assignment:
Together with 3 other founding partners, The Student Hotel wanted to set up a living lab program for solving sustainability issues that occur in buildings. This program focuses on 3 different parties: real estate owners, independent researchers and innovative startups. The real estate owners pose a challenge in one of their buildings, this building is then used as a test lab where an innovative solution is tried, in order to solve the problem of the real estate owner. The result is then measured and monitored by independent researchers and the resulting knowledge is disseminated.
- The PHI approach:
PHI has been asked to provide support in the start-up phase of the living lab. On the one hand in gathering information about the different alternatives on the market, the potential participants, promising innovations and thinking about the design and branding of the living lab. On the other hand, PHI's task was to make an inventory of which partners were needed and to set up exploratory talks with these parties. By using our network and the necessary desk research, PHI made an inventory of the possible partners. In this phase PHI had many introductory talks after which PHI gave advice on how and with which parties to further build the living lab in this phase.
- The result:
The Innovation Lighthouse is now live. With the support of PHI, there is a solid basis to build partnerships. In addition, the extra capacity has helped to get Innovation Lighthouse up and running as quickly as possible. This not only gives innovative startups the opportunity to test their solutions, this knowledge is also being disseminated so that Innovation Lighthouse contributes to accelerating the sustainability of existing real estate.
