Ambitious aviation think tank set for launch

Emirates and a consortium of industry partners will collaborate on the world’s first sector-wide ideation lab of its kind, Experimental Lab (X-Lab) at Area 2071, in hopes of co-creating “the next era of human transportation”.

Area 2071 is an innovation initiative aiming to nurture efforts to “design the future” that was launched by UAE prime minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum to become the experimental nucleus of the UAE Centennial Plan 2071.

Area 2071’s goal is to ask the world’s biggest questions and create solutions that shift paradigms, reshape markets, and improve the lives of people around the world

The Aviation X-Lab will bring together airlines, manufacturers, ground logistics, regulators, engineers, academics, and startups in order to envision a new transportation paradigm, and seek solutions that individual or piecemeal efforts would otherwise be unable to achieve.

Starting this year, the Aviation X-Lab at Area 2071 will host industry summits to envision challenges. It will then solicit applications from internal teams, independent engineering teams, academics, and startups, to help address these challenges by spending a full year working with senior industry executives and regulators to ideate new technologies and business theories, run experiments, and develop prototypes.

Finalist teams from around the world will meet in Dubai each April for an annual event where they will pitch their concepts. Winners of the pitch event will relocate to Dubai the following month along with their corporate and government counterparts to begin a rigorous curriculum co-created by academic and innovation institutions.

Applications for the inaugural Aviation X-Lab will open in November with the first pitches to be presented to the public in April of 2018.

For more information register at www.area2071.ae.

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