How impact happens

What our open innovation platform looks like, what to expect in practice and who to engage with

Approach Decarbonisation Supply Chain Resilience Safety Join

The Trade & Transport Impact practice

Your fast track to innovation

The Trade & Transport Impact practice brings multiple corporate partners together in solving key supply chain challenges and help narrow the scope and uncover the startup solutions available to translate insights into ROI. A cycle with us takes less than five months, enabling both corporate and startup partners to unlock tangible growth opportunities quickly and effectively.

We focus our open innovation efforts within three core areas of any supply chain; decarbonisation, supply chain resilience (SCR) and safety. These areas allow us to dive into niches within each area and address them in practice.

Our approach to open innovation

Narrowing down challenges

We identify critical, industry-wide challenges and solve them through partnering corporations and startups. Corporate partners explore and engage with innovative solutions alongside companies with similar interests. To do so, we and the partners narrow challenges down to a few high-impact areas where value can be created.

Uncovering opportunities on a global scale

An ever-changing tech and startup landscape requires frequent and live insights into possible applications to create new solutions and assess relevance to specific domains and companies. This requires a macro approach to ‘boil the oceans’ to understand how the landscape is moving as well as a micro-focus on key themes that matter most to the industry.

Translating opportunities into ROI

Insights are turned into real options to increase company value. This translates into a growing portfolio of opportunities that both allows for short term results as well as more transformative long-term impacts. Key pathways include: Fastest and leanest path to adopt tech solutions, collaboration to co-create new solutions and building new ventures.

Program design

Phase 1

Understanding the challenge

Market research

Week 1-3. Identify the biggest challenges in the industry and assess relevant trends, emerging opportunities, and opportunity spaces.

Scope challenges

Week 1-3. Thorough scoping workshops with each partner to identify the three highest priority challenge areas to address during the cycle.

Form working groups

Week 3. Find synergies between partner interests, placement in the value chain, or priority challenges to collaborate during the cycle.

Challenge plenum session

Week 3. Sharing insights into the different challenges within the domain area, the challenges prioritised by other partners, and confirm the working groups for partners with joint challenges.

Phase 2

Identifying high-potential solutions

Startup identification

Week 1-5. A continuous and iterative, "always on" approach to scouting and screening startups within the partners' priority challenge areas.

Weekly partner meetings

Week 1-5. Present startups as we identify them and discuss with partners on a weekly basis for quicker feedback, recalibration, and shortlisting of 5-10 startups to meet in the next phase.

Group discussions

Week 3-5. Opportunity for partners to share learnings on common challenges, discuss shortlisted startups and scope potential collaborations.

Solution plenum session

Week 5. Sharing insights into all the startups which have been shortlisted as high-potential solutions to each challenge area, along with discussions to inform the final shortlisting decision.

Phase 3

Selecting engagement options

Determine engagements

Week 1. Aligning options with each partner on which types of engagements are suitable across the challenge areas and solutions identified ahead of meeting startups.

Startup pitches

Week 1-3. Partners meet startups in 1:1/group pitches to assess fit for the challenge first, followed by a meeting with the business unit (BU) and technical experts for technical feasibility.

Startup selection

Week 3. Following presentations and engaging internal stakeholders, partners will decide on 3-5 promising startups to progress to discussing and designing an engagement.

Phase 4

Designing the engagement

Plan engagement

Week 1-4. Developing an initial plan that forms the basis to determine if there is mutual interest and feasibility in the partner working with the startup.

Sign intent documentation

Week 3-4. If the engagement plan reveals an opportunity to begin testing, we recommend the parties sign a non-legally binding Letter of Intent.

Launch day

Week 4. We host an invite-only launch day for each partner to demonstrate progress, share learnings, and invite internal stakeholders.

Decarbonisation track

In this track, we dive deep into some of the most pressing challenges for decarbonising shipping, such as emission tracking, predictive Maintenance & AI, carbon trading & offsetting, fuel additives and lubricants, alternative fuels as well as business model innovations.

See focus area

Key dates

Scoping challenges

Aug. – Sep. 2021

Identifying solutions

Sep. – Oct. 2021

Selecting options

Oct. – Nov. 2021

Designing engagement

Nov. – Dec. 2021

Highlighted partners

SCR track

For this track, we’ve partnered with Enterprise Singapore to address core challenges within supply chain resilience such as end-to-end visibility, supply chain automations, supply chain analytics and supply chain sustainability.

See focus area