As we launch our latest venture to speed up the built environment’s journey to Net Zero Carbon, we explore how our support for sustainability innovations is stepping up, through the 2025 sustainable innovations call out, in partnership with Rutland Forums.
When we launched the Wates Innovation Network (WIN) Portal in 2021, we did so with three goals in mind:
- First, we wanted to support our customers in sourcing innovative solutions that bring down their carbon usage
- Secondly, we wanted to identify and nurture new green tech innovations and solutions
- Thirdly, we wanted to bring both of these together, to connect our customers with green technologies to help achieve the ultimate goal of decarbonising the UK’s built environment.
Sustainable solutions designed by innovators
Since the launch, we have worked proactively with many of our customers to introduce them to solutions that have made tangible savings in both cost and carbon. Along the way, we have signed up more than 100 carefully selected innovation partners to our WIN Portal marketplace, streamlining the process of identifying and adopting sustainable innovations and making it easier for our customers to reach their sustainability targets.
The biggest success stories have come through collaboration. We’ve teamed up with customers to hold panel-style pitch events for start-ups and sustainability innovators, with the winners selected for pilot projects in our customers’ buildings.
We are now scaling this up with a new sustainability innovations call out for 2025 to bring like-minded organisations together in partnership with Rutland Forums.
For our next venture, we will be working with five leading high-street banks and building societies — Coventry Building Society, Leeds Building Society, Lloyds Banking Group, NatWest Group and Skipton Building Society — to seek out emerging sustainability products or services to potentially install across their UK-wide estates. This level of coming together is what we need; the response to the climate crisis will be slow if we work in silos.
What we are looking for this time around
Building on our previous work, we need to continuously improve and reimagine what we have done in the past. By this, we need to make our competition relevant to the sustainability challenges our customers are facing right now.
Sustainability is evolving and it’s becoming much more granular. We need to phase out fluorinated gases (which contribute to global warming), tackle carbon emissions in business travel and enhance biodiversity, but those are big targets that require lots of small and measurable actions to make a meaningful difference.
In this year’s call out, we are welcoming a whole spectrum of innovations. It could be a technology that creates efficiency or a tool that supports behavioural and cultural change. The beauty of the WIN Portal, and our work with other organisations, is that we go in with an open mind.
We welcome the chance to be introduced to a product or service that is completely new to us, and we’re equally keen to see established tech done in new and innovative ways.
We want to be sure entrants can prove the credibility of their products or services; we need to see evidence of tangible results and data that show a product’s potential. An Environmental Product Declaration (EPD), which quantifies the environmental impacts of a product, will be advantageous in this evaluation.
If you are a developer of innovative sustainability solutions and want to bring them to a wider audience, we urge you to get involved. You can register your interest. Shortlisted businesses will be chosen to present their products to a panel of representatives from Wates and the Rutland Forums Operational Sustainability in Finance forum.
