Real Innovation Awards 2020 Shortlist

Agromillora Group

World leaders in in-vitro plant propagation and the production and marketing of fruit and olive trees, Agromillora Group’s long history (it was founded in 1986) is marked by innovation and dedication to the highest genetic and health standards.

What is less well known is that the company’s genesis came about through sheer chance. When three farmers working in the wine region of Penedes, near Barcelona, complained among themselves about the laborious nature of harvesting olives in the traditional way (using a stick to hit the trees and make the fruit fall), one of their number joked about using a grape-collecting machine to collect the olives. More out of curiosity (and without taking the idea seriously) they tied some olive-tree branches to grapevines – and were astonished to find that the machine collected most of the produce. They subsequently discovered that olive trees could be genetically engineered to grow to a specific height and width.

This was the basis of a seminal breakthrough in intensive agricultural production, leading not only to annual sales in excess of 80 million plants for Agromillora, but pioneering developments in technology with the potential to help address critical global challenges of population growth, climate change and water shortages.

  

@Agromillora_

bio-bean

Founded in London in 2013, bio-bean recycles spent coffee grounds from coffee shops, restaurants and offices into sustainable bio-products for a circular economy; including solid biofuels in the form of fire logs for domestic wood burners and stoves, pellets for industrial biomass boilers, natural flavour ingredients for food and beverage manufacturers, and dried, recycled grounds as a bulk raw material for other product innovations. But that hardly merits an Alexander Fleming Serendipity award.

What is remarkable about bio-bean’s story is that its discovery did not come about through any idea-generation process; nor was it the result of plotting value curves to figure out what could be done with coffee-industry waste. In fact, in a true tale of serendipity, the idea came simply from drinking a cup of coffee. Noticing a film of oil on top of his drink, UCL architecture student Arthur Kay wondered whether it had potential to create biofuel. There was, and with fellow ex-UCL student Benjamin Harriman, Kay developed a proprietary, patent-pending process to extract the latent resource and establish what rapidly became the world’s largest recycler of spent coffee grounds.

Seven years on from inception and offering a wide range of innovative, coffee-derived products, bio-bean’s future burns bright: in April 2019 it secured £4 million in equity funding to help launch new product lines and expand internationally.

@biobean

Instabug

During their last year at Cairo university, Egyptian software engineers Omar Gabr and Moataz Soliman built a social media mobile application and needed a platform to test it. Not being able to find a suitable one, they built their own and in 2012, after graduating, launched an app-testing website that leverages crowdsourcing to get feedback from users. But the response was entirely negative, except for one feature: the ability to send feedback within the app without having to leave it or send e-mails.

The founders of Instabug immediately pivoted from their original idea to a simple, in-app tool for developers that provides an easy way to get feedback from users and shortens the time to fix bugs. The clever innovation was quickly adopted by the global tech community and today is used by many leading businesses and platforms, including PayPal, Soundcloud, Lyft and Yahoo, with a user base in 2019 of two billion individual users – enabling the company to attract $5 million in Series A funding in 2020. Much like penicillin’s ability to repel bacterial infections, the app’s ability to help eradicate a different kind of bug was discovered purely by accident – but an extremely happy one for developers everywhere.

@Instabug

invisibobble

Most ponytail-wearers understand the problem of having unwanted creases in their locks after relaxing their hair – not to mention occasional headaches and hair breakage from the elastic hair ties. It was therefore a moment of pure serendipity when Sophie Trelles-Tvede, then an 18-year-old university student, stumbled across a new kind of hair tie in in 2012. As part of her outfit for an ABC (anything but clothes) party, where guests make clothing out of random objects, she used a telephone cord to tie her hair up. The next morning, she woke up (Alexander Fleming-like) to discover… nothing! No headache, no dents and no broken hair – so she decided to start Invisibobble.

The product was dismissed initially as “just another hair accessory” but reported £16.6 million in annual sales in 2019 and is today sold across more than 100,000 locations globally. For a long time, invisibobble relied on its original hair tie for sales, competing with generic imitators. But, in 2019, it pivoted to position itself as an innovator in the hair accessories space, with multiple innovative new products that drove the success seen that year and which promise to cement the brand’s global recognisability.

@invisibobble

With the demand for computing power accelerating exponentially year-on-year, analysts calculate that data storage could account for 20% of all the world’s electricity by 2025, due to the demand from server farms storing digital data from billions of users. Swiss Vault Systems, co-founded by LBS alumnus Dr. Bhupinder Bhullar, has come up with an unlikely potential solution to the rapidly escalating problem. Trained in molecular oncology at Novartis Pharmaceuticals, Dr Bhullar utilised next-generation DNA sequencing technologies to identify the mutations that confer drug resistance – and along the way, demonstrated a method that increased efficiency of the process to discover the molecular targets for drug compounds by one thousand-fold. But the technology presented a big ‘big-data’ headache for hospitals: the data output from a single machine is one terabyte per sample (equivalent to 1,000 DVD films). How could hospitals, with their limited resources, manage the data volume?

Dr Bhullar and Swiss Vault co-founder Doug Fortune built a modular data-storage system that enables hospitals to manage their data simply and efficiently. More importantly, with an 80% reduction in electricity consumption and an 80% reduction in space, the technology dramatically reduces the carbon footprint for our data.  The technology has so many industry applications that it could have the same effect on fighting the “data tsunami” as penicillin once had on repelling bacterial infections.

@SwissVault

Abbas Dayekh

Inspired by the founders of Alibaba and Deliveroo, in 2017, Abbas Dayekh seized an opportunity to bring innovation to Nigeria’s doorstep. He founded OyaNow, a delivery and logistics company providing services ranging from food to e-commerce. Despite the plight of personal financial struggles, as a result of a failed venture that preceded in the loss of $1M which cost him employment, and a toppling tech attempt to develop his software; Abbas remained adamant to reconstruct his life and overcome the cultural and mental blockages of Nigeria’s socio-economic challenges.

Whilst others would’ve given up from the get-go, the mountains ahead were no hindrance to his perseverance. From rock-bottom, he travelled to six countries worldwide on a loan, in an attempt to pitch his idea and acquire eligible investors who also believed in the same vision.

Being in a third world country, Abbas was challenged in mobilising the right mindsets, in addition to educating, and training the youth on how to utilise smart technology solutions. Implementing, technology, training and logistics was a total nightmare when modern day services and transportation was out of reach.

Today, OyaNow’s market brand represents convenience, reliability and quality of service.

@OyanowN

Alexander Rinke

Alexander Rinke and his two Celonis cofounders were students when they worked on a college project in 2011 to improve a local company’s IT helpdesk ticketing process. Rinke realised that the company had many data points but no way to leverage, process and visualise the data. Confident that their idea had commercial potential as process mining software, the founders contributed equally to the €12,500 initial capital deposit and set about building a customer base.

The team was very young, with no experience in developing, marketing, or selling software. Munich then had no culture of entrepreneurship and no successful software company had emerged from Germany for 20 years. Pitching to decision makers was a challenge: Emails were not read, and it was impossible to get a meeting with an executive. Convinced that handwritten letters would be delivered, they sent 1,500 notes to potential customers, among them some of the largest German corporations, and within weeks many new leads were generated. With remarkable persistency and self-belief, the founders bootstrapped Celonis until they got their first breakthrough with a global reseller agreement with SAP in 2015. The next year they finally got external funding, a $27.5 million Series A round led by Accel/North83. Today Celonis’s AI-based process-mining tools are used by companies such as Airbus, Siemens, L’Oreal and Uber, and it has raised $290 million in a Series C round, valuing it at $2.5 billion, making it one of the very few European software unicorns.

@alexanderrinke

@Celonis

Charles Macharia

Charles Macharia formed the non-profit MASH Foundation Trust in 2008 years ago to help educate young children in rural Kenya, providing key learnings on health and sanitation and giving them the business skills to start sustainable micro-organisations. Knowing that such classroom-based initiatives often fail because many parents are simply too poor to send their children to school, and to combat the problem of high illiteracy rates, Macharia developed a series of fun board games and activities to be used in the community, hoping to attract funding and support from local government. Unfortunately, local authorities declined to support the innovative new model, being wedded to a 'trickle-down' system in which international donors give money to central government, who then fund programmes at local level. So, after trying unsuccessfully for several years to get funding - and convinced that the key to success lay in empowering local communities - Macharia decided to work directly with schools to prove that his idea would work. It did, indeed and, by focusing on developing international partnerships, he was able to expand the trust to offer a library, mentorship, sponsorship of students and volunteering opportunities, helping to profoundly change children's health education and life chances in rural Kenya

@MashFoundation

Simon Mottram

In 2002, British entrepreneur Simon Mottram tried to get angel funding to launch an up-market bikewear brand, using an online direct-to-consumer (DTC) business model. But raising capital for a cycling brand then was a titanic task: the road-cycling industry was nascent and unfashionable, Mottram lacked experience in both online channels and professional cycling, and VC funding was nowhere near as available as it is today (it took him over 200 meetings just to raise £140,000).

He also encountered difficulties finding a manufacturer who would meet his high standards and work with “this enthusiastic but inexperienced entrepreneur.” But, driven by belief in the concept and determination that bordered on blind obsession, Mottram refused to be deterred.

Convinced that the industry would grow significantly in the near future, he founded Rapha in 2004 using a then-uncommon online D2C business model, differentiating his offering significantly from competitors by creating an innovative community of cyclists. It was the start of a long ride to runaway success: in 2017, Walmart heirs Steuart and Tom Walton acquired a majority stake in Rapha for £200 million and the UK brand recently reached £70 million in revenue.

@rapha

Sim Shagaya

All of Sim Shagaya’s early ideas flopped; either because the Harvard Business School-educated, Nigerian entrepreneur failed to understand the dynamics of the industry he was entering, or because his ideas were considerably ahead of their time. His dating website (alarena.com) failed because Nigerian internet penetration in the early 2000s was too low to support it. His job site (jobclan.com) and his classified ads site (gbogbo.com) failed to answer customer needs, while media-streaming service iNollywood.com (founded even before YouTube launched in the US) suffered from being too early to market, with insufficient content to make it pay.

But, equipped with knowledge gained from adverse experience – plus an almost unreasonable capacity to bounce back from failure – Shagaya persevered and went on to launch leading outdoor advertising firm E-Motion Advertising in 2005, DealDey (“Africa’s answer to Groupon”) in 2011, Konga.com (“Africa’s answer to Amazon”) in 2012, and learning app uLesson Education in 2019 (intended to make education available to all learners across Africa).

As a result, the pioneer of e-commerce retailing in West Africa has made his fortune several times over and earned many prestigious accolades in the process – including being named in Forbes’ list of “10 Most Powerful Men in Africa” in 2014.

@SimShagaya  

@uLessonApp

Tomilola Adejana

With 58 million adults “unbanked”, over half the adult population of Nigeria lack access to basic financial services and the financial freedom it brings. Knowing that small businesses and informal workers rely heavily on “thrift collection” systems to save, Tomilola Adejana developed Bankly in 2018 to provide a digital framework for these systems, eliminating fraud, decentralising funds and providing a safer path to savings. The platform works well but getting it up and running took enormous reserves of endurance and no little courage on the part of its founder.

Needing to partner with many organisations, including commercial banks, regulatory authorities, telecoms partners and investors, she experienced rejection after rejection in Nigeria’s often misogynistic commercial world (she even had to attend some meetings with older male “mentors” to be taken seriously). And when misogyny wasn’t the problem, venture capitalist told her she had no chance of succeeding against the big telecom companies pursuing similar initiatives.

But Adejana was not to be deterred and simply used the misogyny and cynicism to spur herself on. Eventually, in July 2019, Bankly went live and has already garnered huge interest and support from investors, accelerators and government agencies. The prize? Bankly has realistic ambitions to access 2.6% of the $3.3 billion market in five years – and bring financial inclusion to millions of Nigeria’s unbanked.

@BanklyNG

@Msteebimbs

Arth

Each of India’s annual 8.2 million wood-based cremations burn 400 to 500 kilograms of wood, causing huge deforestation and adding greatly to air pollution. To tackle the problem Arth, a team of students from the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi, decided to use ‘logs’ made of cow dung, with organic additives to increase combustibility, for a more efficient fuel – but the obstacles were immense. First, using significant fund money and resources, the team set up a huge greenhouse to dry the dung. But efficient drying needs heat and wind – and there was no wind inside the greenhouse.

Changing strategy, they tried using LPG heaters with fans – but this conflicted with the clean-energy mission. Finally, turning to biomass to run the heaters, the team reduced the log drying time from eight days (sun-drying) down to two, and eventually got funding to set up a manufacturing hub at a ranch housing 8,000 cows.

This now supplies cow-dung logs to the largest crematorium in Delhi and, in three years’ time, Arth will have prevented the escape of 2.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 4,500 tonnes of methane, and generated INR 40 crores (around £4 million) in wages for the local economy – as well as significantly impacting water pollution by helping to keep rivers and drains free of cow dung.

@arthforpeople Twitter, Instagram, Facebook

Field Intelligence

In 2015 Justin Lorenzon and Michael Moreland, recognising that expanding smartphone use, mobile data infrastructure and cloud computing presented an opportunity to transform the supply and delivery of essential medicines in developing countries – founded logistics software developer Forth, focusing on Nigeria. But, after proving their key hypothesis that the vast number of informal transport workers could deliver essential medicines nationwide, the next stage – securing backing from NGOs and public sector funders for a pilot programme – was not so easy.

For all the goodwill they encountered, support was not forthcoming. They had not found a product-market fit working from the top down, so they decided – in a remarkable pivot – to work from the bottom up, this time in the private sector and with community pharmacies. With lower barriers to entry, they conducted their own pilot, buying $5,000 worth of medicine, then shipping it.

Over three years, Field Intelligence and its pharm-tech platform Shelf Life has grown rapidly through a combination of tenacity, product strength and capital infusion to serve over 280 community pharmacies. Providing quality medicines to over half a million patients and by extending millions of dollars in credit to small community pharmacies they have transformed access to medicines via a new generation of healthcare supply chains.

@fieldintel

Perkbox

Huddlebuy was launched as a group buying platform for SMEs (‘Groupon for small businesses’). It was clear the business model would not work and with 3 months of cash left the the founders 12 pivoted the business model to offering a lead generation service to brands who wanted to target SMEs leveraging their expertise in using social media to target SMEs.

The business was profitable; however, it did not align with the founders’ vision: they had no passion for it. However, based on their extensive interactions with SMEs, they learnt that the one consistent thing that SMEs wanted help with was retaining and engaging their staff.

So, in 2015, they pivoted again, launching Perkbox to provide SMEs with an employee perks platform to democratize the world of employee benefits and help SMEs compete against corporates in the battle for talent. With incumbent employee benefit providers solely focused on corporate customers, Perkbox quickly disrupted the market leveraging their years of expertise in acquiring SMEs through social media. By 2018, Perkbox became the UK market leader working with over 8,000 employers.

In 2019, they evolved Perkbox into a holistic employee experience platform with the addition of new products such as Perkbox Insights, Reward and Recognition and Perkbox Medical.

Perkbox has launched in France and Australia and is in the process of launching globally.

Perkbox has raised over £20M from Draper Esprit, is profitable and delivered £60Million+ in revenue in FY’2019 – proving that, if at first you don’t succeed, pivot, and pivot again...

@perkbox

Segment

Launched in 2011, Segment enables companies to collect, clean and unify their data and connect to over 200 marketing, analytics and data warehouse tools – but, in product terms, it is many iterations away from the classroom-learning tool the founders envisaged. After raising $500,000 in venture capital to develop it, the founders realised the tool was useless: students utterly failed to engage with it.

Going back to the drawing board, the team thought they had found product-market fit with an advanced data-analytics tool – and failed again. In a crowded market, they faced steep competition from global players and, it seemed, were always a tweak away from product-market fit. After a last-resort trip to Y Combinator, they decided, as an experiment, to use a 500-line, open-sourced program to create a new platform and created a simple landing page, with an option to enrol on a mailing list for further news.

After publishing the page on Hacker News, they received thousands of customer engagements and proceeded to develop a new offering to customers: not analytics, but customer data management. Segment has now raised $283.7 million in funding, giving it a valuation of $1.5 billion. All it took was one experiment – and several failed attempts…

@segment

Swiggy

In 2013, Sriharsha Majety and Nandan Reddy, friends from one of India’s premier engineering institutes spotted an opportunity in the country’s booming e-commerce segment and founded Bundl, a logistics aggregator in Bangalore. The idea was to provide seamless logistics to small and medium e-commerce players. However, while many started to take their logistics in-house, the team realized that hyperlocal city logistics play was going to be a much bigger market.

The following year saw a massive explosion in convenience services aimed at solving the problem of last-mile connectivity. No food delivery player had yet built their own logistics network, instead partnering with third parties ­­– but this led to inefficient delivery and lack of accountability, the two biggest customer pain points. Sriharsha and Nandan decided to leverage this opportunity using the lessons they’d learnt. The duo built their own hyperlocal business for food deliveries with a dedicated delivery fleet and brought on board software engineer Rahul Jaimini to complete their founding team. Adopting a lean-startup approach and launching and experimenting with new ideas, Swiggy grew rapidly to become a household name in food delivery – making it India’s fastest growing unicorn up at that point, and at a valuation of $3.6 billion, India’s most valued food-tech company today.

@swiggy_in