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Akademiska Hus invests in development and in promotes innovation

Published Dec 12, 2016

Akademiska Hus is one of the countries largest real-estate companies. Our mission is to, together with universities in Sweden, strengthen Sweden’s status as a knowledge nation. We do this through construction, development and maintenance of environments for education, research and innovation. Our buildings are dispersed over the entire country – from Luleå in the north to Malmö in the South. Around 300 000 people study, conduct research and otherwise work in our buildings every day.

A precondition for Akademiska Hus to be able to create value for it’s clients and contribute to a more sustainable societal development is to actively work with innovation.

The main goal of the work is to develop, through structured collaborations with academia and business, sustainable products, services and methods and thereby create value for the client and society as a whole. Akademiska Hus’ investment focuses on three challenge-driven innovation areas of great strategic importance to us:

  • The Future knowledge and learning environments
  • Campus and urban development
  • Construction and Cleantech

Our approach is based on openness and collaboration with the customer and with partners. The focus is on development, test, demonstration and market introduction, rather than basic research.

It is natural for us to seek to collaborate with the universities that constitute our customer-base and whom our business is meant to serve. A key topic that we have engaged with KTH in previously is the sustainability area. In this collaboration, Akademiska Hus and KTH develop that collaboration further to drive development of research, talent-acquisition for Akademiska Hus and student & researcher recruitment for KTH. The collaboration also includes our engagement in the first and second cycle education through actual cases and guest lectures to the students.

Akademiska Hus’s participation and active investment of time and energy in KTH Live-In Lab is the natural manifestation of our ambition to promote innovation, development and to deepen our relation with KTH.

Our primary focus in the participation in KTH Live-In Lab is to develop our work and our industry’s capacity to optimize the energy utilization and indoor climate in buildings. Digitalization is an enabling trend that has created the opportunity for development of building regulation systems. However, with regard to the adaptability and the possibility to realise additional value-adds through the co-utilization of data, the development has been slow. This is particularly true for the energy optimization that can be made by adapting to the occupant’s activity and behaviour patterns.

Akademiska Hus enters into partnership with KTH Live-In Lab with the project “Adaptive Building Regulation Systems for Energy Optimization”. The ambition is to widen the traditional system boundaries of construction technology and thus enable additional optimization that can incorporate the occupant’s behaviour as well as the new conditions brought on by a new energy mix-trends (including more intermittent production and utilizing more energy storage).

During the fall of 2016, a pre-study is performed to help guide the next phase of the project. The project will be able to utilize KTH Live-In Labs resources in forms of space, data and administrative services and other players, collaborating with KTH Live-In Lab, will be offered access to use installations and data that Akademiska Hus intends to make accessible as part of the project. The project as a whole has a time-horison of 4-5 years and a industry-PhD is part of the planned project as a central resource in the collaboration with KTH.

Stockholm

2016-10-26

Erik Westin

Stf Regiondirektör Akademiska Hus AB

Belongs to: KTH Live-In Lab
Last changed: Dec 12, 2016