Insights & stories

Vandersanden is not only one of the largest, but also one of the most sustainable family-owned brick producers in Europe. At our nine factories in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany, we produce facing bricks, pavers and brick slips. We also provide our customers with innovative facade and street solutions. Craftsmanship, co-creation, innovation and sustainability are the keywords of our approach. And our ambitions are high: we aim to be completely CO₂-neutral by the year 2050.

The European Green Deal, with its goal to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, entails significant changes in the requirements for buildings. CO₂ becomes a new currency and the CO₂ value of a building represents a major factor in all future investments and tenders. In this, circularity plays a major role. Joep Römgens explains the importance of an holistic view on decarbonization.

HOLCIM organized an event in Obourg to discuss the implementation of its GO4ZERO project. The event also featured a virtual display of the project using augmented reality technology. GO4ZERO is one of the most innovative and ambitious decarbonization projects in the cement industry. GO4ZERO represents an industrial-scale implementation of Europe's Green Deal Industrial Plan.

At our Living Tomorrow Innovation campus, visitors are immersed in the world of tomorrow. The "Building of the Future" at the heart of the campus provides insights into smart homes, smart cities and other cutting-edge topics, and also offers a special environment for business meetings of all kinds. As a pioneer of innovation in the construction industry, Xella is an official partner of the Innovation Campus. Peter Lesage, Digital enterprise software architect BIM at Xella Belgium and part of the Living Tomorrow project, tells us more about the partnership.

"The laundry is done" - when Miele launched InfoControl in 1998, it marked the start of the age of domestic appliance networking. The message appeared on a small handheld receiver and saved many a trip to the cellar. Today, household appliances are operated via smartphone, tablet or voice and the range of applications goes far beyond simple control functions. In addition to convenience features, the focus is on cooking assistants and intelligent energy management for the smart home.

Hansgrohe imagined the most sustainable bathroom in the world, a bathroom that functions almost without water : the Hansgrohe’s Green Vision Beyond Water: Rethinking Bathroom Culture.

Punch Powertrain designs its products with the highest level of digitization and automation, tailoring to the needs of an increasingly electrifying automotive market. With its new Multidisciplinary Design Optimization Platform, it created a model-based platform that links multiple disciplines related to e-motor design in a time-efficient manner, ensuring high level of accuracy.

The insurance sector is facing various challenges from shifting clients’ expectations, digital transformation and Big Data to new ways of working. As a leading insurance company, Baloise wants to contribute finding future-proof solutions to these challenges.

Autonomous driving just got a step away from science fiction and closer to our daily life thanks to recent approval by the KBA (German Federal Motor Transport Authority) of the highly automated parking system developed by Mercedes-Benz and Bosch.

Many companies and organisations lack a genuine innovation culture. With Dragons’ Den, BDO Belgium is not falling into this trap, as witnessed by this new internal innovation trajectory.