Sacyr iChallenges open 4th innovation and co-creation program
Today, Sacyr announced the launch of the fourth edition of Sacyr iChallenges, Sacyr’s open innovation and co-creation program targeted at the innovation community to overcome four business challenges set by the company.
This call, with a clear international character, is directed at any innovation agents able to provide solutions to the different challenges issued by Sacyr. Likewise, participation is open to tech companies, universities, research centres, and start-ups, among others. Prospective applicants must submit their proposal through the website sacyrichallenges.com by July 12, 2021.
Sacyr iChallenges is one of the pillars of Sacyr’s digital transformation and innovation strategy, based on a commitment to teamwork and co-creation with the innovating ecosystem on a global scale.
With this open innovation program, Sacyr is looking for partners to promote sustainable solutions that help improve citizens’ quality of life through better infrastructure and services.
In this fourth edition of the program, the company focuses on promoting sustainability, a key cornerstone of its 2021-2025Sustainable Action Plan. With this plan, Sacyr commits to fighting against climate change and dedicates a considerable investment increase to innovation for environmental protection.
“At Sacyr, we believe that innovation is an essential tool for our commitment to the environment. As a committed and innovative company, we focus on promoting more sustainable development by pursuing disruptive solutions that provide us with economic, social, and environmental balance. To that end, we need to identify the best talent in the innovation ecosystem to set in motion innovative projects that help us build a better, more sustainable world,” says Marta Gil, Director of Strategy and Innovation at Sacyr.
To the innovation community, Sacyr iChallenges represent a unique opportunity to collaborate in overcoming global challenges and work with industry experts and with Sacyr’s suppliers and its client network. Furthermore, participating in the program entails having access to funding, scalability, and notoriety.
A bet on sustainability: the four challenges of the fourth edition
This fourth edition of Sacyr iChallenges brings four challenges centred around sustainability. These challenges answer several needs of different business areas of the company:
- Generation of green energies. How to build and transform Sacyr’s lineal infrastructures into green energy generators that are self-sufficient and put power surplus at the service of the market? The challenge consists of coming up with solutions to capture, store and distribute clean energy through the generation of new infrastructures or converting the existing ones to that purpose.
- Measure Sacyr’s ecological impact. How can we improve the valuation and management of the natural capital of Sacyr’s projects? This challenge seeks technological solutions that can value, prevent, minimize, monitor, or compensate the impact of the company’s projects on the natural capital.
- Energy-efficient universities. How can you transform the waste, water, and power cycles of big institutions like universities to minimize the carbon footprint and achieve energy independence on campus? This challenge looks for innovative solutions that transform these great spaces into clean and environmentally friendly operation spaces.
- Optimization of inventory operations. How to optimize the elaboration of inventories of elements on the street? This challenge seeks to identify new urban environment solutions that are scalable to other areas that optimize detection and identification operations of static elements on the street. Altogether, the goal is to measure more accurately and efficiently relevant service proposals, such as the maintenance of green areas, street cleaning, or waste collection.
Schedule, Key Dates, and Selection Criteria
Innovators interested in participating in Sacyr iChallenges 2020 can submit their proposals until July 12 at www.sacyrichallenges.com. Once the submission period is through, a committee of experts made up of managers from Sacyr’s different business areas will evaluate all received proposals.
Next, the proposal that offers the most innovative, efficient, and scalable solutions, technologies, or new business models to solve the issued challenges will be selected. The best proposals for each challenge will be announced at the end of September 2021.
The selected proposals will work with mixed teams made up of external agents and Sacyr business experts to continue developing their solutions and project proposals. The goal is to continue developing their projects to materialize them in a pilot and later integrate them. Likewise, the sponsors of these challenges, managers from Sacyr’s different business areas, will act as mentors to these projects to help the development of each pilot.
At Sacyr Innovation Summit, an event that will take place at Sacyr’s corporate headquarters in Madrid, the selected innovation agents will publicly present their solution initiatives to the challenges issued by the company.
Furthermore, the Sacyr Foundation will recognize, as part of the 11th edition of the Sacyr Innovation Awards, some of the initiatives submitted by the innovating community as part of the Sacyr iChallenges program.
A consolidated innovation program
Innovation is in Sacyr’s DNA, and for that reason the company has been working regularly with the innovation community for over ten years, identifying and developing solutions with the potential to be applied in its various business areas.
Over the previous three Sacyr iChallenges editions, the company has received more than 550 proposals from all over the world to solve the different challenges issued at each edition. Every edition has successfully promoted pilots, among which the following stand out:
- Smart turnpikes: a joint project with the start-up Foqum that looks for new ways to detect and automatically classify vehicles to charge tolls and make the current process more efficient. This project is currently being tested in real turnpikes, and it automatizes and speeds up formerly manual and slow processes.
- ‘Recircula’: this project installs sensors on plastic recycling bins that identify the kind of packaging introduced to make recycling easier. Its technology, RecySmart, allows for waste collection service management and is the first digitized recycling public system, and it involves citizens through incentives.
- Sacyr Explorer Project: a project jointly promoted by Sacyr and Artabro Tech that involves developing a tool for the early detection of business opportunities through machine learning.
