Energy Efficiency in Buildings

If you want to go quickly, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.

I have borrowed this African proverb from Al Gore. It seems relevant to my eco-innovation experience last week, when I participated with some 20 key stakeholders in Philips's Sustainability Innovation Day in Eindhoven, Holland. The purpose was spelled out in the invitation letter: “Let's listen to each other and start an ongoing dialogue to envision innovative solutions. Our goal for this event is to share knowledge and further the process of co-creating a future that will truly make a difference for the generations to come.”

We discussed sustainability and Philips's latest innovations on its High Tech Campus. The campus itself has a very interesting concept of “open innovation”. I found a concept description by Rick Harwig, CTO of Philips Electronics: “It is better to build an ecosystem in which companies find one another. Open innovation makes companies less susceptible to market fluctuations. It allows them to focus on core competencies and substantially reduce time-to-market when industrializing technology into products. This is a major advantage in a market driven by the slogan: first, fastest and fittest. And this is exactly what happens on the High Tech Campus Eindhoven.”

The Campus left me with a very good impression of Philips compared to many companies' closed and often very secretive research centers.

LEEDing thoughts from the USA

Mark Twain created some wonderful sayings – some of them very relevant to this project, such as: “Architects cannot teach nature anything”, and perhaps most pertinent of all: “Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.”

The reason I mention Twain is that the EEB project recently spent a valuable afternoon in the new (LEED certified) Mark Twain House & Museum in Hartford, Connecticut. Hartford is also the home of United Technologies, an EEB co-chair. The company hosted a meeting of the EEB group. An afternoon session in the museum brought together 17 “thought leaders” representing key stakeholders from the U.S. building sector. They included developers, architects, policy-makers, academics and NGOs.

We had an intensive debate on where the US is going and what needs to be done, beginning with behavior change. Energy efficiency is crucial but people will not change their behavior if they don't perceive a threat. And today most American people still feel very comfortable. They are concerned about the price of gasoline at the pump, but they do not know their energy use and they do not perceive climate change as a sufficient threat to provoke action.