Innovation

Grand final of the global innovation challenge
"Play Your Airport" season 2
to imagine the Airport City of the future

Groupe ADP has awarded prizes to the winners of Season 2 of the global "Play Your Airport" challenge, launched in October 2018 with a common ambition: to create the airport city of the future, based in the business district Roissypole. It aims to make the area more connected and urban, turning it into an attractive city district.

The size of a large city, Roissypole is the heart of the most important airport city in the world today, with 384,000 sq.m of offices, hotels and businesses: 10,000 employees work at 80 businesses there, more than 4,000 people stay at its 3,200 hotel rooms every night and nearly 13 million travellers use its RER station each year.
This approach, unprecedented in the airport industry thanks to the diversity of the groups invited to take part - students, start-ups, travellers, Roissypole's occupants and employees of the Group - has sparked creative energy all around the world, with 549 projects coming from 68 countries, 9 finalists and 3 winners.
 
Edward Arkwright, Deputy CEO of Groupe ADP, said: "With this new version of the Play Your Airport challenge and the various contributions to it, Groupe ADP confirms that by nature, an airport encourages innovation and is a real laboratory for developing new technologies and services. The airport city offers great opportunities to unleash creativity and potential innovation. All these contributions will enrich the Paris-Charles de Gaulle development project, as well as the other projects we are undertaking across our network of airports on different continents.

All the groups placed the experience of the new spaces, physical or digital, at the heart of the projects with the aim of transforming this central thoroughfare at Paris-Charles de Gaulle into a more pleasant, livelier, daily living space.

The winners of the three groups chosen by the panel are:
- for the district's occupants, Groupe ADP employees, and travellers' projects (25 projects from 14 countries): L'Estran, a place for welcoming all sorts of creative initiatives, prioritising regional and social values.
- for the student projects (354 projects from 41 countries): Mario Bros, which aims to rethink the district's urban developments, putting leisure and cultural activities at the forefront.
- for the start-ups' projects (170 projects from 46 countries): Wingzy, an app which connects users and residents of Roissypole.

Across the various projects put forward, several major themes relating to the airport city of the future emerged:
- apps allowing the communities to better communicate.
- diverse workspaces.
- recreational spaces for eating and socialising.
- rejuvenating the day to day life of the district.

The panel was composed of internal experts, representatives from Roissypole's businesses and qualified international representatives: Servair, Air France, AccorHotels, and Schiphol Amsterdam Airport. Each group received a prize: the winning student, travellers and Group employee's teams were awarded round-the-world plane tickets; the businesses received support and over 40,000 euros to finance a project.

"Really ambitious projects were pitched to us from all over the world by the four groups who were invited to participate in this second phase of the contest. All these new ideas, some of which have real potential, will feed into our discussions and enrich our studies of development in order to make Roissypole an attractive city district that is more connected and urban, and in doing so, we will transform the experience of the occupants and our travellers in the airport city", explained Serge Grzybowski, Real Estate Director at Groupe ADP.

Launched in March 2017, the Innovation Hub programme embodies a new dynamic of open innovation which addresses openness, transformation and competitiveness, based on a rich ecosystem: incubators, start-ups, academics, centres of excellence and think-tanks. The airport of tomorrow, which will be visited by millions of passengers, will take shape in collective intelligence exercises and through the co-development of new solutions like "Play your Airport". 


Return to the projects of "Play Your Airport" season one
Amongst the initiatives currently under development or testing:  
- Earthport aims to develop a bio-climate terminal thanks to the use of eco-design in everything from the structure to the furnishings. This new terminal concept will be put in place at Paris-Orly Airport by 2021 and will serve as inspiration for our new infrastructures, notably terminal 4 at Paris-Charles de Gaulle.
- The project for a dedicated innovation space at Paris-Orly Airport will be developed at the beginning of 2020. It will complement the Innovation Hub at the Groupe ADP head office at Paris-Charles de Gaulle. The project will incorporate the specificities of Paris-Orly's surroundings to make the airport a real hub of innovation.
- The GONE project, an app which aims to provide a decision-making tool for the airport chain's stakeholders, was developed by one of Groupe ADP's employees. The employee was provided with a unique opportunity at one of our partner start-ups, INNOV'ATM, to help put the app on the market sooner.
- Travel and Share, the social network app looking to facilitate meetings and sharing experiences in the airport, is under development.  
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