More than ever in a changing world, Bouygues Construction relies on research and innovation to support and anticipate new developments that affect its lines of business and activities.

To better coordinate research and development programmes according to its major strategic options and further encourage innovation among staff, Bouygues Construction has created a special department to oversee and coordinate all the resources devoted to research, development and innovation.

The main priorities in Bouygues Construction’s groupwide research programme in 2010 were:

making buildings more energy-efficient, in particular through better control of actual consumption (diagnostic tools, materials performance analysis, usage tracking, etc.) and innovative technologies to produce energy and reduce consumption (solar air-conditioning, external insulation, etc.);

reducing carbon emissions (low-carbon concretes, etc.);

developing a database of the environmental characteristics of finishing products;

developing a methodology for assessing urban biodiversity;

improving air quality inside homes;

evaluating the lifecycle cost of buildings;

promoting eco-design (fine-tuning Elodie^®, a building lifecycle analysis application, taking part in the European Open ,House project to develop and establish a common building assessment method in Europe, taking part in the Bouygues SA and Alstom UrbanEra project).

(Updated: June 2011)