We first partnered with a social and local incubator called Ennovent, a business innovation catalyst with a long experience with a social start-up in sectors related to Veolia’s activities.
Ennovent worked hand in hand to highlight Veolia’s social challenges in the Indian market and find tailor-made solutions through innovative social enterprises.
After analysis, we have defined 3 challenges on which we wanted to co-create with local social organizations:
- Access to essential services (applicable to Water) - to help increase the number of connections in our Nangloi contract
- Solid Waste Management
- The use of compost that would be produced in Veolia India's Nilothi site
After identification of the priority topics, the project “Pop Up India” was rolled out with an open call for application in June 2018. In total, we have received more than 40 applications. Out of these, from an initial scrutinizing based on various pre-determined parameters, 12 organizations were shortlisted to present their strategies and ideas on access to essential services and solid waste management challenges (as no promising start-up was identified on the compost challenge).
The Jury, composed of management and operations employees of Veolia and Ennovent, was set up to judge the presentations given by each of the shortlisted organisations. Based on the remarks of the Jury, three organizations were finalized: Hasirudala Innovation for solid waste management and FORCE and SOFIA for access to essential (water).
We then entered into the co-creation phase where finalists spent more time understanding our specific challenges to test and propose a solution. HasiruDala and FORCE showed the best results at the end of this phase and qualified to test their solution on a longer pilot period and at a larger scale.
As of today, both the organizations are in this incubation phase wherein they are implementing the pilot phase of the selected projects on which you will discover more in the specific following articles.
