Better World Collective
Better World Collective ran from 2021 to 2023 with a mission to connect the UK’s leading corporate giants with the country’s most innovative and exciting startups to amplify the impact of sustainable innovations. The programme's legacy lives on in the lasting partnerships and the groundbreaking products supported.
The Challenge
Over the past decade, corporates have set ambitious sustainability and NetZero goals – driven by regulation, consumer demand, shareholder sentiment and corporate citizenship. To achieve these, they are actively looking for new technologies, systems and approaches.
After speaking with these companies, Plus X Innovation recognised they genuinely wanted to drive sustainability within their operations, but that they couldn’t do it alone.
At the same time, the founders, startups and scaleups developing cutting edge solutions to our sustainability challenges were often operating from a place of obscurity - they had incredible products but couldn’t get in front of the right people within potential corporate partners.
Plus X Innovation has a long and rich history of supporting startup and scaleups building sustainable materials and products, including innovations in bioplastics, vegan leathers, insulation alternatives and urban wind turbines. Many of these innovations have a long development cycle and benefit from early engagement with industry buyers to help inform design and validate market demand.
An opportunity to bridge the gap between giants and innovators to create an impact through collaboration was identified.
The Solution
With shared aspirations, ideals and outcome-based goals, startups and corporates were in the perfect position to work together - if only they could communicate and come together.
And so Better World Collective was launched.
The project acted as a bridge, bringing together these two groups of people, the buyers and the creators, the industry and the innovators, to work together in the early stages of the R&D process.
Better World Collective held a series of summits, bringing together people from all sides of the innovation ecosystem focusing on sectors including packaging, fashion and retail as well as processes for optimising innovation collaborations. The summits took two shapes:
Inspiration, early connections and networking.
The first type of summit was designed to engineer serendipity through curated connections. We brought together 30 leading corporates, including Unilever, Tesco, Costa, Natura, and Marks & Spencer, along with 20 carefully selected startups, scaleups, and academic researchers.
The idea was to create an ‘unconference’, where attendees would proactively identify challenges they could work on together. ‘Speed-dating’, where each startup and corporate could come together quickly with energising and engaging conversations, stimulated ideas and connection. Inspirational talks were held, acting as a uniting force between the businesses in the room, and there was a shared sense that everyone was working towards the same collective goal of positive impact.
By the end of each summit, peer-to-peer connections were made between corporates and the seed of potential collaborations with startups were sown.
Deep dives and specific challenges.
The second type of summit started with a set of defined innovation priorities and challenge statements created in partnership with participating corporates.
Rather than making general introductions, Plus X Innovation analysed the challenges facing the participating corporates and scouted for startups and scaleups developing relevant solutions that were ready to be tested and adopted.
These deep dive summits were preceded by multiple stakeholder interviews and discovery sessions with the corporates to uncover and define the challenges, build buy in from the end user so they were excited about discovering solutions, and map out the resources available.
These conversations with corporations revealed insights into their innovation pipelines. For example, The Body Shop was looking to build a new lipstick case that didn't use plastic but was robust enough to be twisted 3000 times; and Kimberly-Clark wanted to create new packaging for wet wipes that were biodegradable, but also needed to be strong enough not to disintegrate with wet products next to it.
After discovering this connecting thread, we held a packaging summit, which was filled with startups who were innovating directly in this industry and could provide tangible answers to these needs.
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The Outcome
All who took part in these summits have felt the value created on the day and the ongoing power of these collaborations.
Through these impactful summits and resulting connections, corporates have unlocked the potential to fast-track their sustainable material innovation with next-gen pioneers, positioning themselves as disruptive leaders in their industry and ultimately influenced real impact for our planet’s future.
Startups were provided with the access and opportunities they sorely needed to accelerate the commercialisation of their products. Through these collaborations, they received expert guidance from industry leaders and were able to understand the potential impact of their products in the real world.
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