Two days of inspiration immersion and ideation with VELUX
For more than 80 years, the VELUX Group has excelled in its vision of creating better indoor environments by bringing daylight and fresh air into homes and other buildings all over the world. Founded on strong Danish design heritage VELUX is renowned internationally as the world’s largest manufacturer of roof windows.
As a sustainability champion VELUX keeps challenging the status quo and looks for trends that might form the market dynamics in the future. Everything points towards sustainability as a driver so what will that mean for the offering VELUX might have and how will sustainability be expressed?
We were asked to scope, plan and facilitate a two day explorative workshop for 15+ cross-functional VELUX team members.
What we did
As preparation for the workshop we developed three podcast episodes to get everyone on the same page before showing up for inspiration and ideation. The podcasts covered themes such as the ecological polycrisis, greenwashing, VELUX leadership perspectives on sustainability and customer insights on current and future VELUX users.
We kicked-off the workshop with a walk outside drawing learnings from nature’s way of working and discussing principles like natural symbiosis, how variation fosters resilience and the zero waste logic of nature.
Throughout the day the team was introduced to systems thinking, circular economy principles and case examples of businesses that succeed with expressing sustainability in a trustworthy way while delivering delightful customer experiences.
“One of the key takeaways from day 1 is that it is not enough to focus on less emissions and waste in the supply chain if you want to stand out as a sustainability champion. We need to create systems and incentives that keep products and materials in use” (workshop participant)
External experts gave inspirational talks on aesthetics of sustainability and green nudging strategies, and the team got to apply the knowledge through different exercises, learning from what others are doing and applying the systems thinking mindset.
Workshop day 2 was dedicated to co-creating a vision of the world in 2032, understanding and emphasising with the future customer, and ideating on new sustainable offerings triggered by circular economy inspiration cards.
Outcome
The workshop culminated with 4 concepts presented to VELUX leadership representatives.
We left the group with an elevated perspective on sustainability, as a complex affair and how to integrate the principles of circular economy in product and business model innovation.
“Sustainability must be integrated in the core value proposition and used to enhance core benefits. It is not a separate value proposition” (workshop participant)
