21 March 2024, Paris – Dozens of industry-leading corporations launch innovation competitions to source sustainable solutions. It answers the need for plug-and-play solutions to meet ESG-related expectations set by consumers, investors, and society at large. In 2023, it’s Governments, F&B, IT, and Banking that take the lead in pursuing these sustainable innovations.
Innovation competitions: A path to climate-friendly solutions
The numbers, published by innovation management platform Agorize about their clients’ use of their platform, give insight into how leading corporates across North America, Europe, and Asia approach ESG-related challenges and opportunities. Some sustainability topics stand out: 34% of innovation competitions organized through the Agorize platform aim to tackle energy efficiency and another 1 in 3 takes on green transition challenges. Other popular topics are sustainable mobility (16%), sustainable buildings (15%), and circular economies (14%).
“Scouting sustainable solutions through innovation competitions makes sense. It’s fast and effective, especially when organizations can define their exact needs and are ready to implement solutions. It’s great to see that many of the programs we’ve launched aim for sustainable outcomes.”
– Yohann Melamed, CEO and Co-founder of Agorize
Setting new industry standards using collective intelligence
Innovation competitions accelerate organization and business transformation leveraging the collective intelligence of startups, students, or employees, gathering their ideas in one central place to filter out the solutions with the most potential to solve sustainability challenges. In the years 2022 and 2023, Agorize saw certain industries pursue ESG-related most commonly. Governmental organizations were followed by the F&B industry and Information Technology and Services groups. Banking and Transportation companies are strongly represented as well.
Tackling pressing issues collectively
Some of the biggest sustainable innovation competitions corporates have launched with Agorize tackled pressing issues around plastics. The programs built around this topic give a concrete impression of how sustainable objectives are translated into problem statements that can be solved collectively.
1. Sanofi launched its competition to find medical plastic circularity methods.
2. Société Générale sought out startups to remove plastics from food distribution.
3. L’Oréal sourced solutions to reduce plastic packaging in cosmetics.
4. Enterprise Singapore called for startups with zero-waste and sustainable materials solutions.
5. French transportation company SNCF found a solution without negative soil impact to eliminate weeds that were damaging the rail network.
Whether it concerns transforming the way we design processes around energy, mobility, buildings, or the use of plastic, innovation competitions have become a proven method to source better alternatives to the status quo.
About Agorize
Agorize is a leader in innovation management software fueled by a community of 10 million startups & innovators. We’ve helped launch 7,000+ innovation programs for enterprise companies and our customers have named us the leader of our category and the software with the ‘best-estimated ROI’. Organizations like L’Oréal, Huawei, PepsiCo, and Bayer use Agorize to turn transformational ideas into tangible outcomes.
The numbers mentioned in this press release are based on programs launched by corporate and government organizations with Agorize in 2022 and 2023.
