Buildings are alive.
We just stopped
treating them that way.
An honest look at the state of the buildings industry — and what it costs the people inside them.
I walked into Zara on the King's Road. The climate was perfect. The lighting adjusted as you moved through the space. The fitting rooms sensed your presence. The building was working — quietly, invisibly — for the people inside it.
Then I walked into the store next door.
Too hot. Within two minutes, I wanted to leave. I hadn't properly looked at a single rail. I walked straight back out.
Same street. Same heat. Same shoppers. Two completely different buildings.
The difference wasn't the brand, the product, or the window display. It was whether the building was alive — or just standing there.
That moment is why INNON exists. And it's why I'm still not satisfied with where our industry is.
We have the technology. We have the protocols. We have some of the most technically capable engineers in the world. BACnet. Niagara. LoRaWAN. Modbus. The tools exist to make every commercial building in the UK a responsive, self-optimising, human-centred environment.
So why aren't they?
Walk into most commercial buildings today and you'll find a BMS that was commissioned five years ago, configured to the default settings, and never touched since. Set points that haven't moved since handover. Sensors that stopped reporting eighteen months ago. Energy bills above benchmark that nobody can explain.
The buildings are there. The technology is there. The engineers are there. But the outcome isn't.
I stood up at Smart Buildings 2025 and asked this question out loud. I've been asking it for years. The answer, when you strip everything back, is always the same:
The chain is broken. And everyone in it knows it. Nobody just says it.
And everyone is paying for it.
Here is how a building gets built and operated in the UK. Here is also where it goes wrong.
Those red crosses aren't decorative. They represent real disconnections — moments in the procurement chain where the knowledge, the intent, and the responsibility all stop travelling forward.
Everyone gets paid at handover day. Nobody owns year five.
That's the broken chain. And it's been broken for decades.
The BMS Engineer
Technically excellent. Learns by osmosis — plant rooms, not classrooms. Gets handed a spec from the M&E and is expected to deliver it without question. Calls the manufacturer when something doesn't work. Gets a PDF.
The Building Owner
Received the building at practical completion. Got a 30-minute handover. Inherited a system they don't understand, from a supplier they've never met, for a building they're responsible for running for the next 25 years.
The Occupant
The person the building was built for. Too hot at their desk. Poor air quality by mid-morning. Energy bills that nobody can justify. Productivity impacted daily by a building that doesn't know they're there.
"A school we visited had CO₂ levels above 1,800ppm in fourteen classrooms by 10am. The teachers thought it was just 'a Monday feeling.' It wasn't. It was the building."
BMS manufacturers went direct to building owners — and became competitors to the engineers they relied on. Consultants wrote standards that nobody enforced past commissioning day. Facilities managers got dashboards — beautiful dashboards — that nobody checks. Procurement teams added sustainability clauses to contracts that don't survive the value engineering process.
None of it worked. Because none of it reconnected the chain.
It just added more layers to it.
You can't fix a disconnection problem by adding more disconnected parts.
An engineer on our team told us about a CHP unit installed for BREEAM compliance. Switched on once for the inspector. Turned off. Left. The building burned gas for three years. The certificate is still on the wall. Nobody in the chain was responsible for year two. So nobody was responsible.
Most are in the first one.
This isn't a product framework. It's a diagnostic. Walk into any commercial building and within twenty minutes you'll know exactly where it sits.
Dormant 🔴
Default settings since commissioning day. Nobody checks the BMS. Faults go unlogged — or get logged and stay there. Energy bills above benchmark. Occupants uncomfortable. Reactive maintenance only. The building is standing. It is not working.
Waking 🟡
Some monitoring in place. Some data being collected. Partial visibility. Manual intervention when something becomes obvious. The intent is there. The integration isn't. The building is trying to wake up — but nobody is listening.
Living 🟢
Proactive. Responsive. Continuously optimising. The BMS sees everything — temperature, CO₂, occupancy, energy — and acts on it. Engineers get alerts before occupants feel the problem. The building is a living system. It knows the people inside it are there.
Most of them don't know we're there.
Temperature. Air quality. Light. Humidity. Noise. These aren't comfort features — they're the conditions that determine how well humans think, sleep, concentrate, and function. Get them wrong in an office and you lose productivity. Get them wrong in a school and you impair learning. Get them wrong in a hospital and the stakes are higher still.
The technology to get them right exists. It has existed for years. BACnet, Modbus, LoRaWAN, Niagara — the protocols and platforms that can turn a dormant building into a living one are already on the market. They're not experimental. Engineers are deploying them on real projects every week.
The barrier isn't the technology. It's the chain.
When engineers can't talk to building owners. When building owners don't understand what they've bought. When nobody in the procurement process owns the outcome beyond handover day. When the BMS is treated as a cost to be engineered out rather than a system to be invested in.
That's when buildings stop being alive. And the people inside them stop getting what they deserve.
"Playing with technology isn't enough. The point of the technology is the human being on the other side of it. The person in the room. The engineer who commissioned the system. The building owner who inherited it. All of them deserve better than what the current chain delivers."
That's it. That's the mission.
Not a new product. Not a new platform. Not another dashboard that nobody checks. A reconnection — between the engineer who commissions the system and the building owner who lives with it. Between the technology that exists and the outcome it's supposed to deliver. Between the BMS industry and the people it ultimately serves.
INNON sits at the centre of that chain deliberately. We are not a manufacturer with a product to push. We are not a consultant with a report to sell. We are a distributor who made a choice: to treat the engineer, the building owner, and the occupant as equal stakeholders in the outcome of every project.
We carry multiple brands because we studied the problem first. We support after commissioning because we know that's where buildings go dormant. We don't go on site — but we pick up the phone when something doesn't match the datasheet, and we stay on it until it does.
And we're building an alliance. Engineers, building owners, facilities managers, and operators — all aligned around one outcome: buildings that improve the human experience.
Not buildings that pass a handover inspection. Buildings that are still alive five years later.
If you believe buildings should adapt, integrate, and outlast any single manufacturer — if you're tired of copy-paste specs that change nothing, of lock-in that serves the manufacturer and not the building, of a procurement chain that treats occupant comfort as someone else's problem — then you already believe what we believe.
The buildings won't fix themselves.
But the engineers can.
The INNON Partner Programme is built for engineers who are done waiting for the chain to fix itself. No exclusivity. No lock-in. Just a supplier who's on your side — before, during, and long after commissioning day.
The consultation is free. No pitch. No pressure. Just an honest conversation about your next project.