The Innovator

Resourcify, a B2B digital waste management recycling and sustainability platform, connects global companies with local recyclers to optimize their sorting and recycling, reduce costs, and increase the reuse of products and materials. The German scale-up’s customers include McDonald's’s, IKEA, and Johnson & Johnson. Think of it as a digital operating system for a circular future, says Angeley Mullins, the company’s chief commercial officer. “We can turn waste into valuable resources by harnessing the power of recycling,” she says. Some 70% of waste in Europe comes from companies, according to the Franhofer Institut’s 2023 Circularity Gap Report. While some of this waste could be a source of value today, it is instead a drain on resources, as companies pay to have it hauled away and burned. In Germany, under a new law, companies that incinerate their waste are additionally taxed. Today only 17.6% of recycled materials make it back into the production cycle. Some 50% of recyclables are incinerated due to incorrect sorting and some 95% of material value is lost. This is due, in part, to how difficult it is to control waste at scale, according to Resourcify. The market is complicated and fragmented: In the EU there are an estimated 20,000 recyclers, handling 842 waste streams and 97% of it is processed off-line. Resourcify says digitalizing the process makes it far more efficient. The German scale-up aggregates all waste data into a single platform, including waste volumes per material stream, volumes for hazardous/non-hazardous waste, C02 impact of waste management and total recycling rates. Make sure you don't miss stories like this one and support quality journalism. Check out the story on The Innovator's site and sign up for a subscription today. https://lnkd.in/ghyTdGzy

In her latest exclusive column for The Innovator Kay Firth-Butterfield, the former head of #AI at The World Economic Forum. discusses how to combat disinformation. The World Economic Forum has ranked #disinformation as one of the top risks in 2024. The size of the problem and what to do about it is is why she decided to do a follow-up, with the help of deepfake and synthetic media expert, Henry Ajder, to her July column on #deepfakes. Although the two issues are often linked, disinformation deserves to be treated as a category of its own. AI has already played a significant role in disinformation campaigns across the world, from trying to manipulate Indian voters to altering perceptions about the war in Ukraine. When abused for political manipulation, the capability of deepfakes to fabricate convincing disinformation, could result in voter abstention, swaying elections, societal polarization, discrediting public figures, and inciting geopolitical tensions. Another negative impact is the so-called “liar’s dividend”: when people can’t discern the truth, they don’t trust what they see anymore, even when its authentic. The theory is that when people learn that deepfakes are increasingly realistic, false claims that real content is AI-generated become more persuasive too. https://lnkd.in/e-NPSHWM

In the past few weeks executives from Alphabet’s Google DeepMind, Microsoft. and Meta joined tech founders in Bangalore to watch Sarvam AI, often described as #India’s OpenAI, introduce software for businesses that can interact with customers using spoken voice rather than just text. The technology was developed with data from 10 native Indian languages and priced at a rupee per minute to capture the market. Meanwhile Google announced it is teaming with India' Salcit Technologies, a Hyderabad-based healthcare company that uses AI to to help research and enhance their early detection of TB based on cough sounds. It is no accident that the tech giants are paying attention to these startups: #innovation in India is on fire." Indians like to say in Hindi “apna time aayega” which translates to 'our time will come'," says Ruchira Shukla, The Innovator's Interview of the Week. "Our time has indeed come; it is here now, and India is ready to seize the moment." Get some key insights into innovation in India and how Western corporates can harness it. Read our interview with Shukla, the co-founder and managing partner of Synapses , a New Delhi-based VC Fund focused on STEM-led investments in climate tech and health tech. Shukla previously was the South Asia regional lead for disruptive technology investments at the International Finance Corporation (IFC), World Bank Group, and has has over 25 years of experience in venture capital and private equity investing, strategy consulting, and investment banking across Asia, the U.S. and Europe. https://lnkd.in/esMVzdaC

How will #exponentialtech impact our future? Find out by reading The Innovator's interview of the week with Zina Jarrahi Cinker, Ph.D., a condensed matter physicist and founder of XPANSE, a November 20-22 conference in Abu Dhabi that will gather 2,500 of the world’s brightest minds, technology trailblazers, Nobel Laureates, industry leaders, CEOs, ministers, and scientists to set the horizons of exponential technologies, such as #quantum, #neuromorphiccomputing, next-gen materials, #AGI, #genomics, #space habitat, #fusion energy, #brainmachineinterfaces, and more. https://lnkd.in/eB3ycGc6

“We envision that by 2035 #India, and indeed global #agriculture, can be transformed through the use of emerging technologies, innovations and the application of #AI and #data at massive scale,” says The The Agri Collaboratory, which is helping build collaborative government, private and academic ecosystems to help India emerge as a global leader in open source agri innovation. The Indian government has strong incentives to help digitize farming, says former IBM executive Nipun Mehrotra, The Agri Collaboratory's Co-Founder and CEO. About 140 million people in India– about 50% of the work force – are farmers. There are an estimated 114 million land owning famers, and potentially another 50 million who are farming but do not own the land, the so-called tenant farmers at the bottom of the pyramid. Of the land-owning farmers, 80% own small farms of only one or two hectares, he says. Co-creating privately provisioned Digital Public Goods Infrastructure for agriculture, by combining the innovation of the private sector and the scale of the government, can make it transformative, affordable, and encourage start-ups to build businesses and provide value to farmers by leveraging digital public goods and digital public infrastructure, says The Agri Collaboratory .It paints a future in which small farmers can turn farming into a sustainable profitable venture by using the agri indices and advisory to choose crops for the season and increase profits by using predictive pricing and setting a selling price at the time of sowing.  Using farmers’ past digital footprints, from alternate data sources covering sowing to harvesting, cashflow and warehouse receipts, lenders will provide collateral free loans at low interest rates in minutes without visiting a bank. Farmers will avail themselves of subsidies, insurance, and extension services on innovative, environment friendly technologies and practices that improve farming efficiency (less water, higher yield, reduced inputs). They will obtain carbon credit for environmentally sustainable practices that reduce produce wastage, use of natural resources and climate friendly disposal of waste. And governments and public agencies will use open data sets through agri data exchanges to ensure food and nutrition security by optimizing produce grown locally and predicting and preventing price volatility of produce, through using supply chain optimization. Read The Innovator's story, which has been picked up by the strategic intelligence section of the World Economic Forum's website. https://lnkd.in/eidhha-y

Congratulations to Kay Firth-Butterfield on being named one of the 50 women over 50 selected by Forbes! The Innovator is proud to have her as a regulator columnist.

Congratulations to Kay Firth-Butterfield on being named one of the 50 women over 50 selected by Forbes! The Innovator is proud to have her as a regulator columnist.

Phlair (formerly known as Carbon Atlantis), the Innovator's Startup Of The Week, is developing an electrochemical process for #directaircapture (DAC) – a technology that extracts #Co2 directly from the atmosphere, for #carbondioxidestorage or utilization- with what it says is one of the lowest capture costs in the field. The Munich-based startup is the first European DAC company to be a supplier to Frontier, a group formed by McKinsey, Alphabet, Meta, Shopify and Stripe, which has made an over $1 billion advance market commitment to purchase permanent carbon removal before 2030. Phalir is currently building two DAC plants: *Electra 01 in Rotterdam with Swedish mineralization partner Paebbl to produce C02-negative building materials, while sequestering co2 from ambient air permanently. *Electra 02 in Canada with Deep Sky, a Montreal-based gigaton-scale carbon removal project developer. “One of the most pressing problems the world has right now is getting to Net Zero, “ says CEO Malte Feucht, who co-founded the company with two other graduates of the Technical University of Munich: Paul Teufel, and Steffen Garbe.“We offer an important puzzle piece with verifiable and permanent #carbonremoval.” https://lnkd.in/eDiRg8Gf

From manipulating elections to sowing confusion in Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas conflict, #deepfakes are making a meaningful impact on society. There has been an uptick in the use of deepfakes and the volume of synthetic media being created and it is becoming more and more realistic. Compounding these challenges is unreliable deepfake detection tools are providing false positive and false negative results, sowing doubt in authentic images and giving false confidence in #AI-generated ones. In her latest exclusive column for The Innovator Kay Firth-Butterfield, the former head of AI at the World Economic Forum, taps into the expertise of deepfake and synthetic media expert Henry Ajder, to discuss the impact on individuals, business and society. https://lnkd.in/gmYk_vuf

"I strongly believe the next decade will be dominated by the deep technologies in [biology]: organoid intelligence, biocomputers, genomics, multiomics, neuromorphic computing, brain-machine interfaces and CRISPR," says Dr. Zina Jarrahi Cinker, Ph.D., an exponential technology and deep science strategist and condensed matter physicist."We are just starting to crack the code of life and blueprint of living species and addressing longevity, eradicating diseases and transforming pharmaceuticals. We are also making leaps in other areas that at first glance have nothing to do with biology like computation, data storage, or energy conservation for our power-hungry electronics." Her advice ? "You have no idea what else is coming. This is just the beginning. As our leaders, you are the ones who need to have first-hand access to the knowledge of exponential tech. So don’t just keep your eye on the horizon of your own field." https://lnkd.in/eB3ycGc6