Business Zoo

The Business Zoo is an event that originates from the Intelligent Energy Eirope supported project COHERENO, http://www.cohereno.eu

The EU project "Collaboration for housing nearly zero energyrenovation", abbreviated to COHERENO. Nine institutions from five European countries are involved in the project.

By March 2016, they will develop proposals and concepts for promising cross-sector and company business models for high efficiency refurbishment of single-family houses to nearly zero-energy housing. The models are to pave the way for refurbishment from a single source. From financing, consulting and planning, right through to implementation – all parties in the construction process are to be involved.

A major goal of COHERENO is to improve the quality of the construction measures by providing specific support to all stakeholders, thus increasing customer confidence. With these two key aspects, nearly zero-energy houses can gain credibility and acceptance, and win a higher market share.

Within activities of COHERENO, as well as aiming to increase local capacity on nZEB renovations of single family houses as pathway of city of Antwerp becoming an advanced aspiring region of PassREg towards a European front runner, a Business Zoo event was organized in Antwerp in January 2015. Specific building cases from Antwerp were worked on and local building professionals attended the event. It is worth noticing that a previous edition of the Business oo event within COHERENO took place in Brussels (Front Runner in PassREg). This was valuable experience based on which the programme of the Antwerp Business Zoo used the ‘lessons learnt’.

Therefore, the enhancement that was made possible within PassREg on the Business Zoo solution lies in adaptation of the event to suit the aspiring region city of Antwerp using the lessons learnt from a front runner region.