The fourth intake of the Innovator Support Platform (ISP) offers tailored business incubation and acceleration support to SMEs developing products and services targeted at zero carbon housing solutions, smart buildings and estates.

The ISP aims to help innovators to unlock new routes to market, secure investment and breakdown barriers to growth, with at least two innovator challenges running each year.

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•   Positive Homes and ilke Homes partner for zero-carbon housing project

The Zero Carbon: Smart Buildings & Estates challenge could include innovators working on:

• integrating innovative low-carbon generation or infrastructure technologies into the building or estate fabric
• zero carbon domestic heating solutions
• leveraging data from end users, infrastructure and networks to create new services and business models that accelerate the transition to net zero
• enabling active, interoperable control systems that deliver more efficient and flexible operation of the whole building and estate energy system
• delivering better living environments
   

Start-ups will also be granted free membership to the Geovation Hub, an ordnance survey initiative, where they can request specialist support and access an established start-up business network.

The closing date for SMEs to apply for the challenge is noon on 30th March 2020.

A shortlist of SMEs will be generated, and they must be available to attend a workshop at the Catapult innovation hub in Birmingham on 5th and 6th May 2020.  

Julie Alexander, director of technology and innovation at Places for People, said: “Climate change is the most pressing challenge of our time, and with the construction sector and buildings being the most prolific polluters, we need to be much more determined as a sector to tackle this issue head on.

“This call is not about finding the next renewable energy solution, it’s about developing interoperability across systems, using intelligent infrastructure to help us manage demand and supply and identifying new business models that will allow deployment at scale.”