Last Friday, 3 September 2021, we were in Winterthur for Win.Lab, an Open lab Day organised as part of the Swiss Green Economy Symposium (SGES) by Smart City Winterthur and our NTN. This session was a seed capital for the best decarbonisation ideas in the framework of Smart City Winterthur.

The objective of the day was to form innovation teams composed of representatives from public administration units, companies and start-ups, science and students, NGOs and citizens. These innovation teams have followed the living lab approach to test in systematic ways social and technological innovations supporting the smart sustainable city development especially in the context of the Energy and Climate Concept 2050.

Indeed, the recently published Energy and Climate Concept 2050 by the City of Winterthur aiming at net zero CO2 by 2050 lists 54 measures in different action fields. In this context, the 69 participants divided into different teams were invited to develop promising ideas for decarbonisation in the 4 thematic fields in which our NTN works, namely : Energy Efficiency, Mobility, Circular Economy, or/and Digitalisation.

In anticipation of this ideation day organised on the basis of the design thinking method, a campaign to collect ideas was launched among students on the Hype platform and resulted in about 50 ideas; a solid starting point.

In the coming days, the best Ideas will be selected and awarded with Seed Money to be further developed into a major innovation project.