Innovation

What’s Innovative?

The Innovation Category is included within the Green Star rating tools as a way of encouraging, recognising and rewarding the spread of innovative technologies, designs and processes for building applications that exceed Green Star requirements.

There are three different Innovation Credits (for full details please refer to the Green Star Technical Manuals):

INN-1 Innovative Strategies and Technologies

• Points are awarded where it is demonstrated that an innovative strategy or technology incorporated into the building has a significant quantifiable environmental benefit.
• Does the application have systematic investigative and experimental activities?
• Are high levels of technical risk associated with the innovation for the purposes of acquiring new knowledge or creating a new or improved material, product, device, process or service?

INN-2 Exceeding Green Star Benchmarks

• Points are awarded where it is demonstrated that one or more existing Credit Criteria benchmark(s) are exceeded by a significant margin and where that improvement can be considered to have a commensurate additional environmental benefit.

INN-3 Environmental Design Initiatives

• Points are awarded where it is demonstrated that an innovation or design feature provides a significant quantified environmental benefit that is not awarded points under other Credits within the Green Star tool.

Innovation Credits can be awarded at any time after the project is formally registered for a Green Star rating. Two rounds of assessment of the Innovation Credits are currently included in the base certification fee. However should a project wish to have further Innovation submissions assessed, a fee of $400 per innovation will be charged.