POSSIBILITIES
Be curious, exploare and learn.
The journey of an idea.
What happens when you give people with good ideas the time and space to collaborate? Hoare Lea’s Pollinate research and development programme brings people together to work on innovative ideas – read on to find out about Adam, Eirini and Roger’s journey into biodiversity.
The idea Roger had an idea to create wildlife friendly buildings. It not always clear how to understand the benefits that nature can have on existing buildings and how to bring nature in effectively. However, he was keen to create wildlife friendly buildings that welcomed nature whilst simultaneously protecting it against city hazards, with a view to addressing biodiversity decline and provide nature-based solutions for climate adaptation.
Stage one: exploring the feasibility and potential impact The team collected referenced data on biodiversity options and created a scoring system for different aspects of each option, including bird friendly glass, bird or bat boxes and green roofs and drew on knowledge from a previous Pollinate project, investigating the impact of noise from people on animals. This data and a conversation with IT inspired a new way to present, categorise and visualise options to make a biodiversity Wikipedia.
Not only could this solution help rebuild biodiversity, but if used on existing developments it could also be a source of potential income via off-site credits. The nature-based solutions identified could benefit people in a number of ways too, including improvements to air quality, wellbeing, stormwater management, and moderation of the urban heat island effect.
What is Pollinate?
Pollinate is an internal innovation programme at Hoare Lea. It is designed to support people to generate concepts and work towards meaningful solutions. Pollinate’s three stages are designed to filter ideas, develop concepts, and implement solutions.
What is Pollinate?
What is Pollinate?
Pollinate is an internal innovation programme at Hoare Lea. It is designed to support people to generate concepts and work towards meaningful solutions. Pollinate’s three stages are designed to filter ideas, develop concepts, and implement solutions.
Stage two: developing, prototyping, testing The ‘bio wiki’ was good but the data collected was highly detailed and specialised leading to the end user having to spend time researching and making value judgements, leading the team to consider an AI system Large Language Model to process the vast amounts of complex information they had collected and to provide contextually relevant, nuanced responses. They named this chatbot tool Biota.
Integrating generative AI pushed them to adapt quickly, realising they needed to learn how to harness new technologies to supercharge their core expertise. It also meant they could include geographical information system (GIS) visual data to provide users with geolocated responses that highlight priority areas for habitat restoration as well as information on habitat types and species distribution.
The team wanted Biota to be the first point of contact for current and new clients, giving users an idea of the cost-benefit analysis of making their buildings more friendly to biodiversity. The beta tool was shared with planning experts and ecologists across our parent company, Tetra Tech, to help them identify areas for improvement and ensure it supports users in biodiversity decision making.
Stage three: implementing solutions Surprisingly to the team, Biota turned out to be most useful for ecologists, bridging the gap between environmental and engineering experts as well as generating ideas and creating connections. Biota saves ecologists considerable time by extracting detailed information and providing structured answers to set a framework. The team is working with sister companies RPS and Tetra Tech UK to secure funding for commercialisation and tailoring Biota to be a specialised personal assistant for ecologists.
The personal benefits The joy of Pollinate for the team was the opportunity to work together in a space that encouraged creativity, by pushing boundaries and taking risks whilst maintaining the ultimate goal of being able to create solutions that have the potential to make a real difference. They felt profound benefits from collaborating with experts in planning, ecology and biodiversity technology.
What’s next? The Pollinate programme continues to incubate new ideas including developing “cool in summer, warm in winter” low energy housing, using drones and automated data collection for lighting surveys and using AI to better understand how buildings are used.
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