Whats new in Munich airport?
Airport is about to embark on a unique, future-focused project. Under the name LabCampus, the airport will develop an interdisciplinary idea and innovation center on the airport campus. The visionary project will foster cooperation between companies and industries by bringing together leading experts, companies – from start-ups to global players, creative minds and investors – at the heart of a thriving transportation hub with links to over 260 destinations worldwide and plenty of room for real estate development. “There are 150,000 people at Munich Airport every day: passengers, employees and visitors who are potential customers, business partners and visitors for LabCampus. Nowhere else will you find better connectivity to customers and partners,” said Thomas Weyer, CFO and Director of Infrastructure at Munich Airport, making the case for the decisive advantage of the LabCampus location. Albert Füracker, the Bavarian state secretary for finance – representing Dr. Markus Söder, the Chairman of the Munich Airport Supervisory Board – commented: “With LabCampus, Bavaria – which is now already among the leaders in the most respected rankings of places to do business – will become even more attractive. For us, this forward-looking project will ideally complement our clustering policy for high-tech industries and other key sectors. It will showcase a successful and prosperous Bavaria of the future.”
As a blueprint for the city of the future, the new campus will offer a unique meeting point for high-tech industries and key sectors working in such areas as aerospace, digitalization, energy and mobility. Potential key partners include such companies as Siemens and Design Offices and research organizations including the Fraunhofer Institute, Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and UnternehmerTUM, the start-up incubator of the Technical University of Munich.
But Munich Airport is providing more than just the site for the new innovation platform. It will also play the role of “curator”, as the “campus manager”, FMG, the airport operating company, will ensure the appropriate mix of industries and companies, bring the right partners together and develop the campus infrastructure and utilities. FMG will establish a separate subsidiary to manage the project. “In the age of globalization and digitalization, airports have to blaze new trails to find and retain competitive advantages. In that regard, LabCampus is a step that anticipates the future,” said Dr. Michael Kerkloh, the CEO and President of Munich Airport.
The development of the unique innovation site in the north-west of the airport will proceed in several stages. Quadrant 1 will start with the construction of office buildings and FMG’s own Airport Academy. Also part of LabCampus is the Information Security Hub, the center dedicated to the fight against cybercrime that opened at the end of January. An important priority is to ensure that the planned uses of the campus do not compete with local economies in the airport region. With that in mind, the city of Freising, on whose land LabCampus will be built, had a seat at the planning sessions right from the start. The airport will finance the project – as is the case with all of its current expansion projects – with its own resources.
