Synergy
A digital platform and a new business model for promoting renewable energy projects with suppliers.
The big challenge of decarbonisation in carbon-intensive industries lies in Scope 3 emissions from the suppliers and customers of large companies. Cutting emissions within this scope is a highly complex endeavour owing to a lack of resources and capacity on the part of small suppliers to access renewable energy sources and other forms of decarbonisation.
Creating a digital platform for managing renewable energy Purchase Power Agreements (PPA) in a collaborative manner between a large company and its suppliers. Thanks to this new product, smaller suppliers with less capacity can come together in a collaborative manner via a large company and access renewable energy sources that will help them to decarbonise both their business and the value chain of their big clients.
To design such a solution, we have undergone a full, positive-impact innovation process from research to solution prototyping and testing.
We started with a research process where we interviewed suppliers, retailers and energy companies. Thanks to this groundwork, we were able to understand the challenges each agent faced and find the root of the problem in terms of decarbonisation.
We then entered the ideation and conceptualisation phase, where we defined the key functionalities that the product should have in order to provide value to the different agents. Subsequently, we began prototyping a first version of the product and validated its main functionalities with the different key stakeholders.
We went from a systemic challenge to a conceptualised solution in less than 6 weeks.
Thanks to collaborative work, we were able to find out where the big problem in the decarbonisation of carbon-intensive industries lies: no matter how much companies decarbonise their assets and Scope 1 and 2 emissions, the big emissions fall within Scope 3 and are very hard to deal with.
In most industries the reduction of these emissions depends on thousands of suppliers based in different geographical areas that find it very hard to decarbonise their business model, especially in terms of financing.
With this collaborative business model, a big company acts as a connector that brings together all these suppliers to reach a joint PPA, thus enabling the former to decarbonise the latter and cut down the Scope 3 emissions in its value chain.
Sustainability solutions need to be systemic: it is necessary to bring together different agents to address global challenges and come up with solutions that radically transform business models. From the outset, Synergy was conceived with a systemic perspective to bring together different agents.