A conference was held by the managing director of Bayer MaterialScience Italy on April 4 at the company's Milan branch to provide an update on the most recent applications of newly developed energy-efficiency materials. Innovation is one of the driving forces behind Bayer MaterialScience, which invested over 340 million euros globally in 2011 in the development of new materials, principally dedicated to the automobile and construction industries. One of the topics of the conference was Eco Commercial Building, a construction technique developed to achieve zero-emissions commercial and industrial buildings. A number of such buildings have already been built, including a preschool in Monheim, Germany and the Bayer branches in Diegem, Belgium and Greater Noida, India.