An important challenge business must overcome is how to make the connection between climate change technologies and corporate plans, goals, and activities. Since the primary goal of a business is profit, connecting this with making investments in climate change technology can be a complex challenge. Perhaps this can be better understood by examining how climate change can have a negative impact on businesses. Climate change can impact business in several ways. For example, variable weather, such as extremely cold winters and hot summers, resulting in increased flood and drought risk that can, in turn, severely affect supply chains. Disruption of supply chains means there is less supply or delayed supply of raw materials required by businesses leading to disruption of business operations. Similarly, extreme weather events are causing damage to property and negatively impacting the economy, business productivity and consumer spending.
EarlyBirds, the company that operates a business to business (B2B) open ecosystem that provides a way for innovators (startups, scaleups and mature), early adopters and subject matter experts (SMEs) to come together and participate in speeding up technology advancement, wants to point out that companies can decrease their emissions and decarbonise their products and operations through the use of innovative solutions.
This ability to hasten technology innovation in an organisation is important because of the rising demand for technologies, which are designed to address climate change. As such, climate technologies are those innovations that allow the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions and include renewal energy technologies that use solar power, wind energy, hydropower, and the like. Other examples of emerging climate technologies are early warning systems, drought-resistant crops, flood safeguards, supercomputers for better weather forecasting and gathering of climate change data, water recycling technologies, and the use of sensors for detecting signs of global warming.
Such technological innovations are often available through startups and mature companies but sometimes are not pursued to completion because of a lack of funding. As a result, there is a limited awareness of these technologies and even those who are aware don’t understand how they can be useful for their organisation. This is why the EarlyBirds open innovation ecosystem was established to provide a way for these innovators and companies looking for innovations like climate technologies to get together. By using the EarlyBirds platform and programs, organisations can find ways to practically implement these innovations to achieve a particular purpose, such as reducing emissions and decarbonising products and operations.
An important challenge business must overcome is how to make the connection between climate change technologies and corporate plans, goals, and activities. Since the primary goal of a business is profit, connecting this with making investments in climate change technology can be a complex challenge. Perhaps this can be better understood by examining how climate change can have a negative impact on businesses. Climate change can impact business in several ways. For example, variable weather, such as extremely cold winters and hot summers, resulting in increased flood and drought risk that can, in turn, severely affect supply chains. Disruption of supply chains means there is less supply or delayed supply of raw materials required by businesses leading to disruption of business operations. Similarly, extreme weather events are causing damage to property and negatively impacting the economy, business productivity and consumer spending.
Each business or organisation will have their own unique issues and challenges on how they can reduce emissions and decarbonise operations and products. The types of innovative solutions needed to resolve the challenges will be spread across many areas of the business and supply chain. EarlyBirds can be instrumental in helping businesses discover those innovators and their technological innovations for achieving their reduced emissions targets.
The EarlyBirds open innovation ecosystem is composed of two primary parts, the platform with over 3 million global innovators, and the assisted programs Challenger and Explorer. Organisations can subscribe to the platform and learn how to use the platform capabilities and take advantage of the unique EarlyBirds Challenger program. The assisted program, Explorer,is designed to accelerate innovation for the entire organisation as a service. It includes a nominated SME for the business; a platform enterprise license; regular webinars to help stimulate innovation in the organisation; quarterly and monthly innovation days; and a focus on certain innovations. The Challenger program is designed to focus on one particular business or technical problem for the organisation at a time.
Those who are interested in learning more as to how the Early Birds can help organisations to reduce emissions and decarbonising their operations and products can check out the website at earlybirds.io or contact them to discuss your unique requirements.