Munich Airport and the Senseable City Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have reached an agreement to work together on the development of the LabCampus Innovation Center at Munich Airport.
Plans to launch the LabCampus future project – an innovation lab on the airport campus that will promote cooperation between companies and across industry boundaries – were announced by Munich Airport in March of this year.
From this month, the Senseable City Lab will be on board to provide conceptual support for the establishment and development of the new innovation campus. Under an initial three-year cooperation agreement, the Lab – based in Cambridge, Massachusetts – will act as a research partner, supporting the team in Munich as it turns the campus into an innovative smart city.
The goal is to build an ideal urban environment offering optimal conditions for people and companies to work together under one roof. This will provide a setting to design and develop products and services for the world of the future and to test them on-site.
To make this a reality, LabCampus will work with MIT to establish a future-ready infrastructure, focusing on state-of-the-art technologies in the areas of energy, mobility and urban planning, as well as the connectivity between them for optimal sustainability.
Dr Marc Wagener, managing director at LabCampus, said, “This cooperation is a major milestone for our innovation site. We will be working with MIT researchers to study and evaluate the most important trends and digital technologies that can benefit us in the development and successful implementation of a smart city concept.”
MIT Senseable City Lab is the first global player outside of Europe to sign a cooperation agreement with LabCampus. Research institutions that have signed on as innovation partners include FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg and the Hasso Plattner Institute in addition to the Fraunhofer Institute, which is also exploring the possibility of renting space at LabCampus.