Lucy Bruzzone, programme director at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership’s (CISL) Living Lab, discusses how the labs are evolving alongside the UK’s needs
As Andy Burnham prepares to bring his place-based politics from Greater Manchester to Downing Street, Cambridge has reason to pay close attention. The city is not short of ambition, talent or innovation. Entrepreneurs, researchers, local authorities and businesses are developing solutions that could cut emissions, reduce waste and improve resilience.
The harder question is not whether good ideas exist. It is how those ideas move from promising pilots into everyday practice. How do they deliver better places for people, their wallets and the planet?
That question is particularly urgent in the built environment. Buildings and infrastructure shape how we live, work and play. They also consume vast amounts of energy and materials, are at the forefront of climate impacts and lock in decisions for decades. Transforming them is one of the UK’s biggest opportunities to create resilient places, support economic growth and scale the innovation the country is known for. Transforming existing and setting strong standards for new buildings, improving energy performance, designing for reuse and adapting to climate risk are no longer niche technical concerns. They are economic, social and strategic priorities.
Yet innovation policy often behaves as though the main challenge is invention. We celebrate pilots, launch competitions and fund demonstrations. Those things matter, but for many innovators the real difficulty comes after the first successful trial.
A solution may work in one building or campus but still struggle to win the confidence of real world customers. Asset owners need proof it will perform in real conditions. Procurement teams want trusted evidence. Investors look for signs of demand. The result is a familiar gap between demonstration and deployment.
In an earlier piece on retrofit (Warm at work, cold at home: What makes home retrofit difficult?) I argued that many issues have little to do with technology itself and far more to do with confidence, market barriers and decision-making. The same is true across innovation. Too many promising solutions become trapped in “pilot purgatory”: tested repeatedly, praised frequently, but never adopted at the scale required to change markets.
This is why testing in real life labs matters
At CISL, we’ve spent more than three decades helping leaders navigate complex transitions and turn ambition into action. Our Living Lab is taking this into practical action, helping to shape the markets of the future. It is creating the conditions and demonstrating the proof points which allow innovations, technology and business models to scale and markets to be changed. Markets shape what succeeds: where capital flows, which business models thrive, and whether innovation can move beyond niche markets, hero projects and isolated proof points to wide-scale deployment.
CISL’s Living Lab is not just one showcase building or isolated test site. Whilst we do draw heavily upon our own experience and share insights from the Entopia Building, a deep retrofit and innovation hub, we have created an ecosystem of real-world environments where innovators, asset owners, researchers and public bodies are working together to solve practical problems across the built environment. The value lies not only in testing whether something works but in sharing knowledge and generating evidence that others can trust and use.
The development of this ecosystem Cambridge points to a wider lesson: place-based collaboration can support national innovation goals because places contain the reality markets must ultimately navigate.
A building is never just a building. It sits within a planning system, supply chain, financial model and user community. A retrofit decision may hinge as much on disruption, budgets and confidence as it does on carbon savings. A circular economy initiative depends on coordination and demand as much as technical performance.
The Living Lab model recognises that complexity
One example is our work with The Crown Estate, exploring how circular economy principles can be embedded into the future regeneration of Cambridge Business Park. An emerging opportunity which goes far beyond The Crown Estate’s own operations is a local materials reuse hub that, through collaboration and commitment from multiple cross-city stakeholders, could keep valuable materials in circulation and reduce waste. The concept is straightforward. Delivering it is not as new market infrastructure is required to make it work but this is the kind of challenge Living Lab partners are keen to take on.
Other partners bring different capabilities. AVEVA is exploring how digital twins and analytics can support better decision-making. Hills Road Sixth Form College is working with startup Decent Energy to identify energy-saving opportunities, water-saving innovations are being trialled through partnerships that help demonstrate commercial viability. Moving beyond applied interventions we are also working with the Cambridge City Council to explore new messaging and informational campaigns to support better housing at scale across the city, how can insulation and ventilation become the talk of the town?
Together, these projects illustrate a broader point. The built environment transition is a systems challenge. Digital tools, energy innovation and resource efficiency all have a role to play, but lasting impact depends on how they fit within existing institutions, assets and decision-making processes, how we change markets.
That lesson has national significance
The Government’s Modern Industrial Strategy rightly focuses on investment, technology adoption and future growth sectors. But innovation does not drive productivity simply by existing. It must spread through organisations, supply chains and places.
For sustainability innovation to scale and funding to support this, trusted evidence, capable customers and clear routes to procurement are required.
This is where the UK’s innovation debate needs to mature. We often think about research at the start of the pipeline and commercial success at the end. The crucial stage sits in the middle, where technologies must become investable, procurable and repeatable. When that stage is weak, even strong ideas struggle to scale.
That challenge is central to CISL’s partnership with Connected Places Catapult on test beds and innovation passports. The UK has world-class testing facilities and living labs, but too many operate in isolation. Businesses can find themselves repeating the same validation exercises, while buyers struggle to compare evidence generated elsewhere.
Innovation passports offer a potential solution. If evidence from one trusted test bed can be recognised by others, innovators can spend less time re-proving what works and more time delivering it. Buyers gain greater confidence and public investment in pilots begins to build on itself rather than starting again from scratch.
The goal is not a centralised national system. It is a connected one. Cambridge can remain Cambridge, while other places develop approaches suited to their own strengths and circumstances. The important thing is that learning travels.
For policymakers, this matters because industrial strategy is ultimately about capability. The UK needs practical mechanisms that help organisations adopt new approaches and manage risk. Connected living labs could become part of that capability by linking demand, evidence and investment more effectively.
For the built environment, the prize is significant. Challenges such as circular construction, energy optimisation and climate resilience depend on coordination across fragmented markets. No single organisation can solve them alone. Living labs create spaces where technologies, partnerships and new ways of working can be tested together.
They can also make innovation more accessible. Colleges, hospitals, local authorities and business parks are not peripheral to the transition. They are where many of the most important decisions about buildings and infrastructure are made. If innovation can work in those settings, it is far more likely to work at scale.
None of this is easy. Shared standards require trust. Data governance must be robust. Asset owners need confidence to move from curiosity to procurement. But the value of a test bed should never be measured by the number of pilots completed. It should be measured by whether adoption changes as a result.
The UK has world-class universities, creative startups and sophisticated asset owners. It also faces pressing challenges around productivity, retrofit, infrastructure and climate resilience. Those issues should not be treated separately. The same places that need to decarbonise and adapt can become the places where new markets are built and economies grow.
That requires a shift in mindset. We need to stop treating pilots as endpoints and start treating them as evidence infrastructure. We need demonstrations that help others act, not simply admire.
The next phase of good growth will be won by places that can turn experimentation into confidence and confidence into investment. Living labs, connected test beds and innovation passports are not peripheral to that ambition. They are part of the infrastructure that allows innovation to scale.
Our Living Lab is still evolving, but its central lesson is already clear. Place-based collaboration can do more than demonstrate solutions. We can build the trust, evidence and demand that allow sustainable innovation to move beyond individual projects into wider markets unlocking the systemic barriers currently hindering adoption.
Britain has no shortage of good ideas. What it needs now are connected places where those ideas can prove their value, generate trusted evidence and move quickly into the markets that need them. For a Prime Minister shaped by devolution, public transport reform and the practical realities of governing a major city region, this should be familiar territory: growth is not delivered by Whitehall instruction alone, but by places with the powers, partnerships and confidence to solve real problems. If a Burnham government wants Cambridge, Manchester and other innovation-rich places to drive better growth, it must help build that infrastructure of adoption. The country’s living labs will not simply test the future. They will help create it.
The post To scale green innovation Britain needs more than pilots, it needs places that prove what works appeared first on Planning, Building & Construction Today.
