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The Process

IIS Zürich coins R&D cooperation by forming university-industry or industry-industry partnerships. The process is initiated when a technological niche has been identified with growing relevance and awareness. Expert groups from both, academia and industry are then brought together and a preliminary project is being designed to address commercially-interesting applications. The expert team pursues R&D up to prototyping and securing IP. In order to attract external funding, the project is then consolidated either into a joint research project or a start-up venture. Currently our main projects are:

  • Thermally Active Structure (TAS)

    An IIS-led consortium has completed transformative R&D on how to advance building energy efficiency. This is known to be best achieved by leveraging a building's enclosure to become a thermally active membrane. We have developed a smart building envelope that is automated, thermally active and adopts the entire thermal function of a building. The core of our solution is a mass-produced structural module that gives rise to the structure of the building and houses refrigeration-cooling and heat-pump functionality. The resulting planar heating-and-cooling function of this smart building envelope not only introduces a step change in building energy efficiency but also vastly improves indoor thermal comfort. With currently seven U.S. patents granted, the technology is being commercialized in the US. For more information see

  • Timber Concrete Composite (TCC)

    In order to reduce building-materials use, as the most efficient way to nurse resources in the construction sector, we have developed a novel composite technology that combines large quantities of one-dimensional components (rods) with two-dimensional components (panels) to create a three-dimensional structural element. The one-dimensional components are significantly reduced in size and evenly distributed to achieve in-plane stabilization of the two-dimensional components. Prefabrication of this new composite technology involves the separation of one- and two-dimensional components for machining and assembly. This enables extended materialization and ensures higher cost efficiency and ease of handling. A straight-forward realization of such a system is for horizontal structures such as prefabricated floor elements, preferably implemented via hybrid materialization such as timber concrete composites (TCC). For more information please visit