Our vision at UR Lab
Creating better places together
URW Lab is Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s Lab for Innovation.
To create Better Places together, URW Lab has three missions:
UNDERSTAND
Our prospective approach
Setting up a Vision for the Future
Today, the world is facing major shifts. Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield has started an internal exploration aiming at identifying the social and technological trends that will transform society and shape Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s future. URW Lab organizes explorations with experts, learning expeditions, workshops, and leads surveys on people across Europe.
Building on the findings, the idea is to structure our strategic vision and devise disruptive products and services that will serve Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s projects.
TRANSFORM
Our innovation priorities
Finding innovative solutions for mobility
- How should we adapt shopping centres / assets and parking spaces to new forms of mobility?
- How can we encourage the adoption of greener and less CO2-consuming modes of transport for our visitors?
Making our assets smarter
- How to leverage on AI, machine learning and IoT to optimize operations and improve customer knowledge?
- How to bring data science to Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s business model and predict consumer behavior, leveraging it for our retailers?
Co-designing on development projects
- How do we co-design our development projects with neighbouring communities?
- How is it possible to create more modular and dynamic spaces?
Enhancing customer experience
- How to better serve our clients with innovative digital services?
- How to better know and personally interact with them?
- How to offer a seamless and omnichannel shopping experience with innovative retailers?
Rethinking assets as distribution hubs
- How can we optimise delivery to and from our centres?
- How do we adapt logistics to our environmental objectives and in particular how to remove untreated waste?
Promoting new usages
- What is the next food experience?
- How do we seize value not only on new products selling, but also on exchange and second-hand products?
- How to improve the way we work at Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield?
INVOLVE
Innovation programmes
Launched in 2014, Innovation Champions is an internal career opportunity designed for the Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield’s Employees who are eager to develop their innovation and creative skills. Innovation Champions were imagined as Intrapreneurs (i.e. behaving like entrepreneur while working within a large organisation) in charge of a particular exploration or pilot project on a strategic topic: 3D technology, urban agriculture or chatbots for instance.
The ICGP offers employees of the Group the opportunity to participate in training programmes dedicated to innovation and devote up to 20% of their time to innovation projects. In 2017, 25 collaborators of the Group participated to the programme.
