Urban Biosphere : an innovative partnership with the Icam Business Services Hub

The Low-Tech Apartment perfectly demonstrates the ability of companies to collaborate with the expertise and creativity of engineering students to develop concrete, innovative, and environmentally friendly solutions. This ambitious project represents a new milestone in the initiatives led by Corentin de Chatelperron, an Icam graduate engineer, in partnership with the Business Services Hub at Icam’s Grand Paris Sud and Nantes campuses.

Across our seven campuses, Icam carries out 250 projects annually for SMEs, mid-sized companies, and large corporations across all industries. With flexibility, Icam adapts its multidisciplinary resources and expertise to analyze business needs and provide pragmatic solutions: product design, process improvement, energy management, and digitalization.

In practice, an Icam team—composed of a business manager, a project leader with an industry background, and project engineers (final-year students)—works full-time to advance innovation projects, such as the Urban Biosphere.

Bringing fresh ideas to projects through Icam project teams

Students from Icam’s Grand Paris Sud and Nantes campuses developed five low-tech innovation projects that were installed in this experimental apartment.

Corentin de Chatelperron expressed particular satisfaction with this collaboration:
“I thought it was fantastic to work with students who brought fresh ideas to the project and managed these initiatives completely autonomously. There was only a weekly call and occasional visits, but entrusting them with this research and development really expanded our research capabilities. We were able to explore a wide variety of systems and multidisciplinary approaches that we wouldn’t have been able to handle on our own. Delegating these topics to the students allowed us to be far more creative, fast, and efficient.”

This project highlights a successful collaboration between the Business Services Hub at Icam’s Grand Paris Sud and Nantes campuses and the Urban Biosphere initiative. Together, they designed innovative and environmentally friendly solutions, imagined by several project teams.

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