16 July 2025 - The University of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL) and The Crown Estate have today announced a major new partnership to accelerate sustainable innovation and collaboration in the built environment and support nature recovery across the UK.
As the founding partner of CISL’s new Living Lab, The Crown Estate will work with CISL to fast-track the adoption of sustainable solutions and innovations across the built environment.
Based in Cambridge’s pioneering Entopia Building, a deep sustainable retrofit, the Living Lab brings together businesses, innovators, researchers, and policymakers to collaborate, test, and scale real-world solutions for a greener built environment. It will initially harness the Entopia site to generate insights that can be applied to other projects – from new builds to retrofits – and will support the piloting of new technologies, sharing data and lessons with partners, industry and policymakers.
Through the partnership The Crown Estate will share data and learnings from its proposed new start-up, lab, amenity and events space at Cambridge Business Park in north-east Cambridge. New innovations can be benchmarked across both buildings and, in the future, more sites and building types could be added to create a network of sites within the living lab, providing greater data and insights.
James Cole, Chief Innovation Officer at CISL,said: "We’re excited to partner with The Crown Estate as the inaugural partner of our Living Lab, which supports the UK’s clean growth ambitions by raising standards across the built environment. This collaboration will help industry leaders, innovators, and academics pilot and scale sustainable solutions that can deliver real commercial, social and environmental value. We want to show that sustainability in the built environment is not just the right thing to do but also makes strong business sense."
The built environment drives 40 per cent of global emissions and is increasingly vulnerable to climate impacts, affecting building risks and compliance. Yet, sustainable buildings present a $1.8 trillion global market opportunity by 2030, with the UK green building sector expected to more than double by 2033.
Matthew Sampson, Regeneration Director at The Crown Estate, said: “Driving sustainable innovation is an important facet of The Crown Estate’s strategy, helping us create economic, social and environmental value for the UK. Partnering with CISL to help deliver this sustainable innovation fits well with our work in the sector, and we’re excited to see the partnership grow and flourish.
“We’d encourage innovators to find out more about the Living Lab and make the most of this exciting initiative.”
The Living Lab is now open for startups, academics and companies to join the knowledge community and innovate together to unlock sustainability action and economic opportunity across the built environment. More corporate partners of the Living Lab will be announced over the next month and a Living Lab Summit will take place 31 July to officially launch the initiative.
The partnership between CISL and The Crown Estate also includes a new Nature Positive Solutions Accelerator to support entrepreneurs and small businesses deliver innovative solutions for biodiversity, sustainable land use, water systems and environmental regeneration.
By working with CISL and its innovation networks, The Crown Estate will help create opportunities for small businesses to play a leading role in building a more sustainable, nature-positive economy.