Understanding LEED Innovation in Design & Exemplary Performance Credits

The Innovation in Design credits award points to projects that incorporate innovative and sustainable building features that exceed the LEED Rating System requirements or thresholds. Innovation may begin at a project’s conception, but it can enter at any step of the process and come from any member of the project team. During initial meetings, explore opportunities to incorporate innovative strategies, achieve exemplary performance for existing LEED credits, and develop pilot credits, based on the project scope. Review the project goals and targeted credits to determine whether the project is likely to meet any exemplary performance criteria. Innovative strategies and measures, by definition, have widely varying initial costs and operating costs, depending on the degree of complexity, the materials incorporated and the novelty of the technology. Initial costs may range from free to prohibitively expensive. In order to understand the implications of the design features, a life-cycle analysis can be used to determine whether the strategy or product is cost-effective over the entire lifetime of the building.