Background
Fujitsu is a global technology company with a purpose to make society more sustainable by building trust through innovation. Building on a significant legacy of complex and large scale systems integration, Fujitsu wants to build, manage & participate in cross-industry Digital Ecosystems focused on solving big societal problems.
Challenge
Climate change has highlighted the need to adopt sustainable approaches to every aspect of our lives. The homes that we live in need to deliver on the commitments being made at every level of society to move as fast as possible towards a ‘net zero’ carbon approach.
For new housing the challenge is significant, but legislation and modern building practices are being put in place to deliver extremely efficient, resilient, sustainable and low-carbon housing.
Existing housing stock is a much bigger challenge, with sustainability driven upgrades often being complex and expensive, and with many options to consider. As climate change begins to take effect housing also needs to be modified to cope with the challenges of changing in weather patterns. Lastly, the financial considerations are also highly variable – from the complexity of grants and subsidies to the highly volatile charges for energy.
Fujitsu is interested in developing a platform that will allow existing homeowners to access a recommended plan, tailored for an individual property, to allow for them to identify the fastest and most cost effective way to make their homes more sustainable. In this context sustainability would cover a broad range of objectives including low-carbon, low-resource consumption, and limited environmental impact.
The platform would allow for a high degree of personalisation of advice including taking into account:
• Individual homeowner (and home dweller) circumstances
• Locality environmental factors
• Changing financial support options
• Current building strengths, weaknesses and opportunities
• Comparisons with other similar buildings on the sustainability journey
• Predictions for likely future changes – e.g. energy costs, weather patterns etc.
• Predicted financial benefits (potentially tracked through ongoing measurement)
Fujitsu’s vision for any Digital Ecosystem to tackle this type of societal problem incorporates the active participation of cross-industry organisations on a digital platform. In this context this could be simply providing data insights to the platform, or go as far as offering innovative and broad ranging services to home owners. Organisations that might support the platform could be data providers, energy companies, technology solution providers, installers and maintainers, government bodies, financial services companies, trade bodies and others.
Fujitsu’s commercial vision for the platform would be free and high-perceived value to home owners (‘sticky’) with the cost of platform provision being covered by levies made through the sale of sustainability related services on the platform.
What's in it for you?
A potential partnership with Fujitsu to help fund, develop, market and provide the platform throughout the world. Fujitsu has significant presence in many countries already, and has deep relationships with many relevant public and private sector organisations.