Today, 15 February 2023, InnoRenew CoE celebrates its sixth year of establishment. To mark this occasion, the InnoRenew CoE Annual Report 2022 has been released. This report gathers information about all of the institute’s achievements, activities and developments from the past year.

“Many memories were created, and many achievements marked 2022,” Dr Andreja Kutnar, InnoRenew CoE director, writes in the institute’s annual report. “It is always a challenge to choose which to emphasize as the entire year was built on many smaller successes.”

In 2022, the InnoRenew CoE team welcomed eight new employees, bringing the total number of employees to 76. InnoRenew CoE employees come from 21 countries, including Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Ghana, Finland, France, Hungary, India, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Pakistan, Poland, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Thailand, Tunisia and the United States. International employees make up 43 percent of the institute’s total workforce.

InnoRenew CoE employees

In the last year InnoRenew CoE hosted more than 2000 guests. Among organized events they hosted also the Woodrise 2022 congress, held under the honorary patronage of the President of the Republic of Slovenia Borut Pahor, and the grand opening of its new building in Izola with a ceremony attended by the institute’s partners and special guests.

Opening of the InnoRenew CoE new building

Opening of Woodrise 2022

“Perhaps the most significant change for InnoRenew CoE was moving into our new state-of-the-art facility,” Dr Michael Burnard, InnoRenew CoE deputy director, writes. “For the first time since the very early days – when InnoRenew was a small team focused on developing the organisation – all InnoRenew CoE employees have a place under one roof.”

Another special moment in 2022 came in the form of awards and recognition given to a project InnoRenew CoE consulted on. The Hotel de Len in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, was a renovation project that transformed an older hotel in the city centre into an extraordinary example of using wood, especially recovered wood, in beautiful and sustainable ways. The hotel won its category, Snow Queen, in the National Geographic’s Hotel Awards. The hotel received notice in many other outlets including The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, and The Times.

Hotel de Len

Additionally, InnoRenew CoE employees submitted 42 funding proposals and contributed 295 scientific communications in 2022. Among successful projects was also Dr. Anna Sandak who received a European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant for the project Bioinspired living skin for architecture (ARCHI-SKIN).

Check out the online version of InnoRenew CoE’s Annual Report 2022, with details about all of the institute’s activities from last year!

InnoRenew CoE could not achieve this degree of success without the help of its project partners, the University of Primorska, Fraunhofer WKI, the Slovenian National Building and Civil Engineering Institute, the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Heritage of Slovenia, the University of Maribor, the Pulp and Paper Institute, Zavod eOblak, the National Institute of Public Health and the Regional Development Agency of the Ljubljana Urban Region.