Dr Marc Wagener: If we talk about LabCampus, we talk about innovation. 

If you look at how innovation works, you'll see that over the past 20 to 30 years, there has been a shift in how innovation is being done. Some 30 years ago, when I started my career, classic innovation was goal-driven; today, there are fewer and fewer areas where this traditional approach is working. The innovation world is now much more decentralised and distributed; I call this the 'democratisation of innovation'. 

For us, one important factor in this distributed world is cooperation across industries, across companies of different sizes, along with start-ups, with academia and so on. This is about orchestrating this network of small and distributed innovation we can see in the world. This is basically what LabCampus is about: we want to be the physical place where people and companies come together in a very creative and open environment. 

From my perspective, the airport is optimally suited for this, because airports are already much more than just a place where people hop on and off a plane. Munich Airport is now a place where people meet, you have entertainment facilities – so airports are already now at this stage where they play a bigger part. 

We have about 150,000 passengers coming here every day, which is the optimal test bed for companies where they could get feedback for their new ideas and products.

In its role as curator, the airport will have to construct LabCampus in three different layers. 

The first layer is a special architectural concept of how we set up our little city. There's a big trend in which work and private life are merging together. You can see in Silicon Valley, they are creating campuses for their employees where they can do more than just work, and that is something we want to bring here. We want to have a special environment, a special campus atmosphere, with an architectural design that allows people to work, go out, where they can be creative and where they can stay after work, bring their kids, or do sports. We want to build a smart city that is suited to the latest trends. 

On top of that, we would like to offer the companies specific digitalisation services, which enable them to do better innovation. Here in Munich we also have some excellent institutions that provide start-up services. 

And lastly, we also want to play a very active role in bringing the companies together here on the campus, but also within the Munich and Bavaria area.

Siemens and SAP are already working on projects with us on the campus. We are in discussions with other companies, and we can see there is a high interest in this at an international level. 

We also already have a lot of partners [who] come to the table, research organisations including the Fraunhofer Institute, Friedrich Alexander Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, the Munich University of Applied Sciences and UnternehmerTUM, and the Technical University of Munich, which specialises in entrepreneurship and start-up foundation.

We have numerous other projects. LabCampus is about diversification and you might have heard that Munich Airport is innovative in many aspects and we're growing more as an airport city now. We're still focusing on the third runway, on expanding our terminal facilities, but we're not concentrating on one project only: this is not an ‘either/or’ plan for us. It's more about a balanced approach. 

We have a certain industry focus on topics like future mobility, logistics and cybersecurity, but we also want to be open. We are building something up for the next 20 or 30 years so nobody knows what the trends will be then. So we will also be more open in bringing companies from other industries with a more distant link to the airport here, which we perceive as being innovative in general.