Towards a novel living Lab Model for sustainable innovation in the construction industry

According to the United Nations Environment Programme, the construction industry is a key sector to achieve sustainable development, as it can provide important benefits in the complete construction lifecycle considering its three axes: social, economic and environmental. At the same time, negative impacts can be drastically reduced if new collaborative business models and strategies are defined integrating both end-users and different actors in the construction value-chain. Therefore, this paper introduces a general overview of a collaborative research project carried out by ITESM and CEMEX to develop and deploy a novel Sustainable Construction Living Lab (SCLL) model to bring together key construction stakeholders into an open innovation and user-centric environment, supported by a high-tech platform, providing working principles, methods and a governance model to identify next generation construction innovations (e.g. products, services, processes, business models, etc.) in order to satisfy the current and emerging market demands in a sustainable way.