Students at Sacred Heart University of Luxembourg (SHULU) are helping to make construction and housing in Luxembourg more sustainable after developing innovative projects at an ideation camp.
An AI-driven platform to connect non-living spaces with community and sports groups, a materials bank for circular construction, an online market for used materials, a certification process for material quality, and a modular, house-within-a-house concept for unoccupied spaces made up the five concrete business plans that were developed.
Created as part of the university’s “Sustainability in Action” Leadership Platform, the ideation camp was run in partnership with innovation agency Luxinnovation and +Impakt.
“None of the 22 MBA students had any prior experience in either circularity or the construction industry,” said professor of management at Sacred Heart University Luxembourg and ideation camp coordinator Marcus Muller. “Our ideation camp enabled them to become ambassadors of change through sustainable innovation and transformation.”
All five ideas will continue to be developed through Luxinnovation’s idea-to-flagship pipeline while the teams behind the material bank and certification project will benefit from SHULU’s Capstone Consulting Services Course, taking the project forward with Luxinnovation as client.
“Our ideation camp enabled them to become ambassadors of change through sustainable innovation and transformation.”
Marcus Muller
Dramatically overhauling the use of construction materials will be essential for nations to rein in CO2 emissions. According to the United Nations Environment Programme’s global building and construction sector’s status report, in 2018 construction accounted for 36% of final energy use and 39% of process-related CO2 emissions. Of the emissions, 11% came from manufacture of building materials such as steel, cement and glass. A circular approach would ensure that materials could be re-used if the buildings they were made for are torn down.
The SHULU projects follow a momentum in Luxembourg begun in 2021 with the publication of the country’s circular economy strategy, shaped by the Third Industrial Revolution report published in 2016 and zero waste strategy adopted in 2020. Elmen, a housing estate in the west of Luxembourg, is among the landmark circular economy construction projects already underway. Some 800 affordable homes are expected to be built as part of the SNHBM project, all of them Lenoz-certified and half of them timber-framed with dramatically reduced energy consumption.
Luxinnovation director of company relations and support Johnny Brebels praised the ideation camp’s “outstanding results”, saying that “beyond the educational aspect, the sustainable and innovative dimensions are perfectly aligned with Luxinnovation’s mission to support companies and contribute to a digital sustainable economy. In case some of the student teams intend to create startups we could also see how to support them with incubation, state aid, acceleration or venture capital as we do for other startups.”
