Last edited 14 Mar 2015

Future building, The Low Impact Building Innovation Platform

On 3 March 2015, Innovate UK published Future building, The Low Impact Building Innovation Platform.

Innovate UK (previously the Technology Strategy Board) is the UK’s innovation agency, an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). It funds, supports and connects innovative businesses through programmes intended to accelerate sustainable economic growth.

Innovate UK’s innovation platforms bring together the public and private sectors to work on societal challenges. The Low Impact Building Innovation Platform (LIBIP) is Innovate UK's innovation platform for the Built Environment. It was established in 2008 to focus on the developing market in low impact solutions for new build projects and refurbishing existing buildings.

The report sets out how up to £60 million in grant funding will be invested between 2015 and 2019 to meet the challenges faced by the built environment and to support business-led innovation.

It suggests that urbanisation, climate change and energy security are demanding more from the built environment than ever before, and proposes that, ‘Meeting these demands will require significant innovation. We will need to find resilient, sustainable and adaptable solutions, that can be delivered with precision and at high quality on an industrial scale. We must develop new ways to design, construct and maintain our built environment.’

The funding will bring together the private and public sectors in areas that have high growth potential:

High performance materials and building technologies.
Digital design and engineering.
Energy eco-systems.
Energy management and diagnostics tools.

Simon Hart, Low Impact Building Innovation Platform Leader at Innovate UK said: “Our funding will help transform the sector, integrate supply chains, capitalise on the UK’s current leadership position, mitigate import threats, develop growth sub-sectors and exploit export opportunities.”