One experiment is better than a 1000 expert assumptions!

Our words of thankyou at the occasion of winning the Innovation Award for Living Places September 23:

Thank you to 安永 , Dansk Erhverv and of course the jury for this award. It means a lot to us at VELUX to receive this fine recognition for our Living Places concept, where we, together with our good partners EFFEKT , Artelia Denmark and Enem?rke & Petersen a/s , have shown how we today can build the homes of the future with a significantly lower CO2 footprint than the current standard. It was already an honor to be nominated together with the other inspiring projects, and now we have won!

We know that we are facing a significant climate challenge; 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries have been exceeded, the planet cannot support us if we continue as we do today. The construction industry accounts for 1/3 of global energy consumption and CO2 emissions, and thus also with great potential for solutions that can reduce the CO2 footprint. It is urgent in "the decade of action" in which we find ourselves, there is a need to think innovatively, and with a systemic approach to solve the very large ecosystem challenge we are in the middle of.

At VELUX, we attach great importance to social responsibility, we have a concrete objective to take leadership and drive development by setting new standards for sustainable construction. It is not a new ambition, it dates back to our founder Villum Kann Rasmussen, who founded VELUX as

"a model company with an objective to work with socially useful products and to treat its customers, suppliers, employees of all categories and shareholders better than most other companies. A model company earns a profit that can finance growth and maintain financial independence.”

Villum Kann Rasmussen also had a philosophy that one experiment is better than 1000 expert assumptions. That it is better to try, to prototype, than to simply assume and stay in theory. For the past 80 years, we have applied this philosophy as DNA in our work with innovation, and for more than 2 decades, we have worked with over 30 demonstration projects within sustainable construction in 22 countries - with Living Places as the latest project.

All projects are anchored by architects and engineers in VELUX – and always with partners in the industry. Precisely for this reason, we are all incredibly proud to receive the Innovation Award. Because the results that we have created together with our partners with Living Places stand on the shoulders of the innovative and pioneering spirit that is a very special DNA in VELUX.

With Living Places, we have shown that with today's technologies, materials and techniques, we can already build homes that are healthy for us to live in and that have three times as low a CO2 footprint as what we normally build for. But it requires us to rethink the way we build. Because no one in the construction industry can create the change and innovation that is needed alone. It requires a systemic change where we think about the planet and people from the start, work together across the value chain, and insist on sustainability as a parameter in line with price and quality.

Therefore, we also hope that with our efforts - and here this fine recognition contributes big time - we can inspire other players in the industry to enter into partnerships with high ambitions, and create decisive innovation on a large scale in construction, to benefit for both the planet and us humans.

On behalf of all of us at VELUX: thank you very much for the award!