Green innovation tasks:
Project description
1. TASK
Context
The World Wildlife Fund (WWF)s new Living Planet Centre headquarters has been built to extremely high standards of sustainable construction that, in many areas, exceeds current performance requirements set out in the Building Regulations. The Living Planet Centre has received a Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Methodology (BREEAM) highest possible rating of outstanding. Hopkins Architects, the lead designer for the building, and Willmott Dixon, the lead contractor, introduced a wide range of green technical and process innovation to the development. The innovations include: the UKs first through-life cycle carbon assessment, which resulted in a 42% reduction in carbon compared to the as designed evaluation at the planning stage; a full Forest Stewardship Council-certification of all timber and timber-composite materials; and, a novel arched roof designed to maximise renewable energy from photovoltaic panels and natural daylight.
Task:
Green innovation, as with all innovation, is a combination of product and process innovation. For example, the WWF performance requirement to have a full carbon assessment led to the specification of new materials and systems (product innovation) and new forms of sustainable procurement (process innovation).
You are a manager in Willmott Dixon and the senior management board has asked you to prepare a short report that sets out the lessons learnt from the key green innovations from the WWF Living Planet Centre project. In particular, the senior management board want to understand fully the product and process implications of the key innovations to enable these innovations to be more readily adopted in other building projects. The report needs to address the following two tasks:
Part 1: Identification and description of the three key green innovations that were developed in the WWF Living Planet Centre project. The analysis should justify the three key green innovations in terms of their commercial potential and technical novelty.
Part 2: Identification and description of the product and process implications for each of the three green innovations identified.
The report should be fully supported by with appropriate policy, industry and academic references.
Report:
The report is to be individually prepared (this is NOT a group submission).
The report should be structured as a management report in three main sections: an executive summary and the two parts detailed above.
The assessment will take into the OVERALL quality of the report but, as a GUIDE ONLY, the breakdown between the sections is as follows:
The report must be in the range of 1,900 to 2,100 words exclusive of references and any appendices. One of the learning outcomes of your report is to develop your ability to present your arguments in a concise fashion. Text over the 2,100 word limit of the main body of the report, therefore, will not be marked.
As a GUIDE ONLY, the word count of each of the three main sections should correspond to the guide assessment weighting. The appendices should be a maximum of 4 A4 pages and should be fully cross-referenced to the main body of the report.
The report must reference all sources used in Harvard style.