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UBC Theses and Dissertations

UBC Living Lab : innovation in accelerating the adoption of sustainable technologies for campus infrastructure Save, Paul William

Abstract

Any group that creates challenging goals for the future also requires a strategy to achieve them. In the University of British Columbia’s (UBC) case, the goals are to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 33% below 2007 levels by 2015, 66% by 2020, and 100% by 2050 (UBC 2010c). The strategy was to develop the University Sustainability Initiative and the Campus as a Living Lab to assign authority and responsibility to help manage this endeavor. The Campus as a Living Lab at UBC provides a process for simultaneously meeting increasing infrastructure capacity requirements while achieving sustainability goals. The Campus as Living Lab accomplishes this by collaborating with industry partners, operations, and researchers to utilize the campus as a test bed for commercialization of sustainable technologies. This thesis explores the Campus as a Living Lab program at UBC and the replicability of it as a tool to expedite the adoption of sustainable technologies for campus and municipal infrastructure. Part of this exploration involved developing and amalgamating business process models for current practices at UBC, and conducting a 16-month long ethnographic study to extract key transferable characteristics for replicability. The research culminates in a series of comprehensive and generic business process models that illustrate what is required to develop and maintain a Campus as a Living Lab program.

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Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada