Purpose and strategy
1. To be a good co-owner of the corporate group
2. To be a good manager of the foundation’s wealth
3. To be a good philanthropist
As co-owner of the corporate group, the foundation – together with the other shareholders – must work to provide the corporate group with the best possible framework for carrying out its activities. This is done by appointing the board of VKR Holding together with the other shareholders, and also maintaining a financial contingency that can be used as needed by the group, and that can also be used to buy the B shareholders’ shares in the company if these come up for sale.
The foundation’s finances and assets must be managed in such a way that the foundation can meet its obligations at any time. The assets are invested diversely and must ensure the highest possible risk-adjusted return. We have a particular focus on green, climate-friendly investments and combating climate change. Philanthropic distributions should be made if the proceeds from the foundation’s co-ownership of the group supplemented by the return on the foundation’s assets so allow. Thus, it is not a goal in itself to build up assets in the foundation beyond what is to be used for the foundation’s obligations – other funds must be returned to society through philanthropic grants.
Based on the group’s results, the foundation works to contribute – in an exemplary way – to living up to the founder’s thoughts as set out in the Trust Deed.
Currently, the foundation’s philanthropic main focus is to support and develop an enlightened world and a broad level of knowledge within technical and natural sciences. A quest we believe has never been more important or relevant. By cultivating and supporting the brightest minds, we help to create the basis for making the best decisions for the benefit and joy of all.
How we work:
- Systemic
- Adaptive
This means that we set a goal (an intention) and then work on long-term initiatives that are adjusted along the way (adaptive). These initiatives are chosen, designed and implemented with significant involvement of relevant stakeholders (systemic), ensuring broad understanding of the initiatives. We believe this approach adds the most value. Thus, there is a lot of involvement of relevant stakeholders in the chosen areas both before, during and after a given initiative.
The foundation’s overall focus in these years is the technical and natural sciences.
With more than half of the foundation’s grants, Villum Foundation wishes to strengthen the foundational research in engineering and natural sciences at the Danish universities. It is at universities that new knowledge and new insights are created. This is where many of the ideas that Denmark will live off in the future will be hatched. And this is where the young people who have to build the future on new knowledge receive their education. The vast majority of grants are awarded in open competition for researchers’ own ideas, with quality as the sole selection criterion.
The foundation works to strengthen children and young people’s understanding and interest in science – strengthening the science capital of Danish children and young people. We support this by focusing on the work to make science relevant through study-based and realistic science education in schools and upper secondary education programmes, and by giving children, young people and their families access to inspiring science activities in their spare time.
Outside Denmark (in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, France and Italy), the foundation works to equip Europe’s young people to become frontrunners in the digital and green transition. This is done by vocational education programmes with a green and digital focus. The four countries/regions have been chosen according to where the VKR Group operates.
Together with the foundation’s support for technical and natural sciences, all these activities aim to strengthen our common understanding of the world and our ability to address the common challenges and exploit the opportunities that a greater understanding provides.
From time to time, standalone major projects in or outside Denmark are supported – primarily within the cultural area – as well as smaller projects focusing on daylight and fresh air.
Through its recurring grants to associated foundations, the foundation supports their work in the global climate area – as well as a wider range of social and environmental areas.
No one is better at coming up with good ideas than researchers themselves. Therefore, Villum Foundation offers a range of measures that in different ways give researchers the opportunity to pursue their own ideas. When it comes to groundbreaking research, e.g. the invention of the laser, you cannot always know what to research to get there. So we give high priority to the research that is driven by the researchers’ own curiosity.
From time to time, we choose to support a specific research area – examples of which are Power-to-X, which focuses on the generation of materials and fuels from climate-neutral energy sources as well as research into artificial intelligence. But these are exceptions to the foundation’s primary strategy for funding independent research.
In general, the idea is to create the best and broadest possible scientific preparedness – because it is not possible to identify in advance which scientific breakthroughs will be relevant to solve the world's challenges and move the world forward.
Examples of this are the climate challenges facing the world. Villum Foundation has supported research that started with a curiosity about the movements of the ice sheet. Via ice core drilling, this later led to a mapping of the composition of the atmosphere over the past several thousand years, which helps to increase our understanding of climate change. We have supported basic research in chemical catalysis to understand how chemical processes can be accelerated – and this knowledge now forms the core of future Power-to-X plants. We have long supported basic research into how to convert direct current to alternating current. This is crucial when electricity from wind turbines and solar cells is to be converted into the electricity that comes out of our power sockets. And we have supported researchers whose exploration and explanation of basic mathematical relationships has enabled significant reductions in the energy consumption of data transfers on the Internet.
And outside the climate area, the support to build a basic understanding of the microbiological diversity of the world around us led to the development of technologies for identifying and tracing virus variants, which was key to the handling of the corona pandemic.
This was all knowledge and insights that were not based on a known and defined problem – but which subsequently turned out to be of great importance for specific problems.
Research is international by nature – new knowledge is created at home in the laboratory, but is refined and further developed in international collaborations. And the results generated by the foundation’s grants are used all over the world. Understanding the evolution of the composition of the atmosphere, developing technology to spread green power and producing new climate-friendly materials and fuels are advances for the whole world. So even though the foundation as a point of departure, cf. its Trust Deed, primarily supports research at Danish universities, the results benefit the whole world.