Open Innovation Test Beds for materials for building envelopes (IA)

Open Innovation Testbeds for building envelopes including roofs and facades should use buildings as “living laboratories” by:

• Open Innovation Test Beds (OITB) should upgrade or develop materials facilities and make available to industry and interested parties, including SMEs, services for the design, development, testing, safety assessment, and upscaling of smart envelope elements particularly for energy saving and emission reduction of buildings;
• Integrating solutions in a “nearly zero-energy, zero emission” design concept together with solutions for indoor and outdoor air quality control, taking into account EU Energy and Environment policies;
• Providing robust monitoring approaches, as well as methodologies and tools to:
  • monitor in a quantifiable way (at least 24 months), the efficacy, performance and cost-effectiveness of the solution compared to existing alternative options;
  • assess how the solutions contribute to the different EU environmental and energy challenges, taking into account different environmental exposure scenarios and durations, including impact of inhabitants.
• Enabling the replication of prototypes in different buildings, regulatory contexts, including business model replication and protocols for design, taking into consideration the trade-offs between the three sustainability pillars, the life cycle stages as well as their impacts;
• Regulatory, economical and technical barriers should be identified and assessed. Where applicable, risk-assessment procedures e.g. fire, safety and noise should be considered;
• Facilitating the communication of local authorities, regulatory and standardisation bodies with innovators of building materials to rapidly address regulatory issues;
• Open access at fair conditions and cost as well as outreach and dissemination across Europe, based on a distinct methodology;
• Use of computer aided design, modelling and simulation of processes and products.

Proposals submitted under this topic are encouraged to include actions designed to facilitate cooperation, across Europe, with other projects; to enhance user involvement; and to ensure the accessibility and reusability of data produced in the course of the project.

Proposals should therefore include a business case and exploitation strategy, as outlined in the LEIT Introduction in this Work Programme. In particular, they should demonstrate the likelihood of an additional turnover of at least 4 times the requested EU funding, within 5 years of the end of the grant.

Activities should start at TRL 4 and achieve TRL 7 at the end of the project.

The Commission considers that proposals requesting a contribution from the EU between EUR 7 and 15 million would allow this specific challenge to be addressed appropriately. Nonetheless, this does not preclude submission and selection of proposals requesting other amounts.

""Nearly zero-energy, zero emission buildings"" can make substantial contributions to COP21 goals. However, a large scale deployment of these buildings relies on marketable, cheap, flexible, on demand material based-solutions for energy and resource efficient buildings. The challenge is to show that laboratory based solutions are replicable and can be up-scaled to solutions attractive and profitable for real applications. It is, therefore, crucial to act on real building envelopes, through actions that would create profound economic, social and environmental impacts, bringing together industry, public authorities and citizens. An Open Innovation Test Bed with services across multiple member states will enable these actions while also helping developers of innovative building solutions adhere to EU regulatory practices, including their adaption to local specifications.

• Realisation of open and upgraded facilities at the EU level for the design, development, testing, safety assessment, and upscaling of materials and components for building envelopes, easily accessible to users across different regions of Europe;
• Facilitated access to building testing/monitoring equipment and to finance (in particular for SMEs) through a single entry point;
• At least a 20% increase in the number of new SME users for existing test beds;
• At least 20 % improved industrial process parameters and 30% faster verification of materials performance for highly promising applications and at least 30% reduction in energy consumption across the entire life cycle;

Relevant indicators and metrics, with baseline values, should be clearly stated in the proposal.