The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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| Two European deep tech companies announced June 13 that they are planning to jointly build a production plant in southern France that can produce biocarbon and e-fuel from renewable raw materials. The integration of complementary technologies developed by France’s Soler Group and Germany’s Ineratec aims to optimize the conversion of forestry residues (and other biomass materials) into high-quality biocarbon and syngas and then use that to make high-value e-fuels.
E-fuels, also known as synthetic fuels, are liquid fuels produced from renewable energy. These fuels have similar chemical properties to fossil fuels and can be used in conventional combustion engines without the need for modifications. However, the production of e-fuels requires a lot of energy, which must be generated from renewable sources to have a positive environmental impact. The new plant is expected to produce 12,000 tons of e-fuel annually, increasing the availability of carbon-neutral fuels for hard-to-abate mobility sectors such as aviation, shipping, and road transport, Tim Boeltken (PhD) managing director and co-founder of Ineratec, said in an interview with The Innovator.“We plan to export this technology globally,” says Boeltken. North America is a target. Read on to learn more about this story and other important technology news impacting business. |
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Harvesting Farmer Network (HFN) is building a technology and data-driven intelligence engine that aims to bring speed, accuracy, transparency and prosperity to the world’s largest and oldest industry: agriculture.
It has already gathered 3.7 million farmers in India onto a single platform, with the goal of using technology and new business models to make smallholder farming profitable.
And it is only the beginning. India native Ruchit Garg, a former Microsoft executive who successfully built and sold a startup in Silicon Valley before returning to his home country to launch HFN, wants to create market linkages to 120 million smallholder farmers in India and later potentially expand to other countries.
At the same time the Indian government is now building its own digital foundation for the agriculture sector called Agri Stack starting with some foundational Agri data sets needed by everyone that will span 150-170 million farmers, 800 million farm land parcels and hundreds of crop varieties sown across India. Agri Stack aims to make it easier to bring various stakeholders – including s 2000+ agri tech startups and other private companies --to come together to improve agriculture in India, enabling better outcomes and results for the farmers and helping the government do a better job with agri-management. The government is building on its success with India Stack (now called Citizen Stack), the name for a set of open APIs and digital public goods that has unlocked identity, data, and payments at population scale, which has now been exported to more than 10 countries.
Meanwhile, The Agri Collaborator, an India-based “non-compete, Agri Think & Do Tank” which is set up as a non-for-profit, is working with government, Indian and international organizations to assess and improve the level of digitalization and data currently available in agriculture, across key focus areas.
These private, public and NGO efforts in India to bring agriculture into the 21st century could end up aiding struggling smallholder farmers around the world.
“This problem is not India centric, it is a global problem,” says Garg. “500 million smallholder farmers feed half of the world and they are struggling to make their livelihood.” |
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| Who: Raffi Krikorian is the Chief Technology Officer at the Emerson Collective, an organization focused on education, immigration reform, the environment, media and journalism, and health founded by Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs’ widow. An engineer and tech leader, Krikorian previously worked as vice-president of platform engineering at Twitter, running a global engineering team. At Uber, he helped start and run the self-driving efforts tasked with building and deploying the first-ever self-driving and passenger carrying fleet. When Donald Trump was elected president of the United States in 2016, Krikorian pivoted to put his technological know-how to use in the political realm. He joined the Democratic National Committee, as their first-ever Chief Technology Officer, to create a unique team fused with campaign and industry veterans, to secure the party after its breach by Russian state actors and to entirely revamp its tech infrastructure.
Topic: The dangers and benefits of AI
Quote: "I think we need to acknowledge that we are in a time of flux so nothing that we do today is going to be the correct thing. We need to move away from seeing black or white options: not doing anything at all and leaving it to market forces or passing strict legislation on the technology that never gets unwound or updated. I think the conversation needs to zoom out. It’s less about the nuances of the technology today and more about the values."
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| Portugal’s Infraspeak has developed an AI-powered Intelligent Maintenance Management Platform (IMMP) that works for both facility managers and field service companies. Its 900+ customers include Intercontinental Hotel and Resorts, Primark, a global fashion, home and beauty company, and the KFC restaurant chain.
Think of it as a collaborative operating system for facility management that also includes a marketplace, connecting facility managers with all the external help they need. “We work with both sides of the market,” says co-founder and CEO Felipe Avila da Costa. “We not only help each player in the market manage their internal operation better; we also help manage the relationships between them.”
Facility management includes things like maintenance, cleaning, compliance, energy consumption and security, areas that any organization that operates buildings needs to cope with. That’s why the scale-up says its solution can be used by every sector from hotels, hospitals, airports and banks to supermarkets and stadiums.
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| Number of generations it will take to close the global gender gap, according to the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Report 2024, which was released this week.
“Despite some bright spots, the slow and incremental gains highlighted in this year's Global Gender Gap Report underscore the urgent need for a renewed global commitment to achieving gender parity, particularly in economic and political spheres,” Saadia Zahidi, Managing Director, World Economic Forum, said in a statement. “We cannot wait until 2158 for parity. The time for decisive action is now."
While parity in women’s labor-force participation improved in 2024, regional differences remain significant, says the report. At the industry level, LinkedIn data indicates that women's workforce representation remains below men's in nearly every industry and economy, with women accounting for 42% of the global workforce and 31.7% of senior leaders. Additional factors, such as gender gaps in professional networks and care responsibilities are slowing economic progress for women. The World Bank estimates that closing the gender gap in employment and entrepreneurship could increase global GDP by more than 20%.
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