Dive Brief:

• The building industry has devised numerous energy-saving innovations over the years, but Stephen Selkowitz wanted the innovators to be able to test their ideas in realistic settings and interacting with each other.
• Being the leader of the windows and envelope-materials group and a building-science advisor at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California gave him an opportunity to attack that problem, and the result is the new Facility for Low Energy Experiments, popularly known as FLEXLab.
• In the lab, users can mock up their buildings with the materials they plan to use, and the mock-ups can be oriented in various ways to put them in the conditions they will face in the real world if they are built.

Dive Insight:

Selkowitz says the failure in innovation has been not being able to understand how multiple systems and products will work together. His goal in creating the lab is to be able to test "moving parts" together before the industry has to learn over the life of a building whether each can hold up and perform over time.