This year kick starts the European Year of Skills, adopted by the European Commission following the announcement by President Ursula von der Leyen in her 2022 State of the Union speech. The initiative focuses on the green and digital transitions and how they are opening new opportunities for people and the EU economy.
The green and digital transition are essential to enhance the economy and social resilience. Regarding the construction sector, there is room for innovations that can improve circular economy practices, considering that its waste makes up over one-third of total waste generation in the European Union. Therefore, at Reincarnate, we will contribute to spreading our green and digital innovations using learning material to stakeholders of this industry.
Social innovations to foster circular innovations
One of the main barriers to sustainable innovation adoption for construction and adoption of sustainable innovations depends on dispositional, social, and cognitive factors. At Reincarnate, we will develop the required social innovations for establishing circular markets and value flows and understand the mechanisms for fostering the widespread adoption of these technologies and processes.
To make a change that does not only impact specific organizations but also happens at a societal level, we will develop an empirically grounded theoretical basis. In other words, we will create knowledge based on the analysis and documentation of our demonstration activities that will be spread through the learning material.
Interactive training on circular innovations
The construction industry represents an enormous untapped efficiency potential for climate neutrality, primarily driven by the uptake of digital solutions in buildings’ construction, maintenance, refurbishment, and demolition stages. Moreover, in 2021, construction was one of the 28 occupations ranging from shortages and showing a growing demand for both high and low-skilled workers.
Transforming a linear into a circular built environment offers its workers and newcomers significant opportunities. Our contribution to this pathway will be developing interactive training material provided online using a dedicated teaching platform. Thanks to this learning material, the knowledge created by the project will be at the disposal of all construction industry stakeholders.
Furthermore, the Reincarnate team will encourage a common understanding of the positive impact of circular economies and the role of neutral buildings in it, both in terms of resource efficiency and the labour market. For that reason, highly accessible content will be produced to engage with society following scientific communication principles.
Upskilling the labour force while demonstrating innovations
The digital transition must be fair and just. But unfortunately, more than three-quarters of EU companies need help finding workers with the necessary skills. As The project will achieve a Societal Readiness Level, society will be aware of the solution and the benefits. The use cases will validate a smooth and safe integration with the labour force, where over 1,000 workers will be trained in specialized skills for operating our circular information management system.
Specific training material will be developed to streamline the transfer of technical knowledge to the workers, supporting the upskilling related to basic digital capabilities, operational upgrades, and generic consideration of the model. This material will be designed considering non-specialized profiles with support from social innovation, directly translatable to other languages, and facilitated as part of the scope of our pilot demonstrations.
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