August - 12 Months of Innovation

As part of our ongoing series, "12 Months of Innovation," we are thrilled to celebrate the achievements of our standout contributors for August. Each month, we recognize a customer, a solver, and an organization or start-up who have demonstrated exceptional innovation and commitment to pushing the boundaries in their respective fields.

Customer of the Month – Alte Leipziger

How can you power a culture innovation within your business? Through Wazoku Challenges!

Alte Leipziger ( ALH Gruppe ) is a German insurance company with teams across Europe delivering personal insurance and finance to its clients. Previously, Alte Leipziger had an idea suggestion scheme – run on paper, at small scale, and not connected between insurance divisions. While employees had great ideas to improve the business and its services, there wasn’t a great program supporting and celebrating the innovative members of ALH Gruppe.

Following a successful pilot with Wazoku, Alte Leipziger set up and utilized the Wazoku Platform to power its culture of innovation from the ground up.

The Wazoku Platform gives ALH employees private team rooms, a wider employee suggestion system, and a cooperation/service provider database. By systemizing and widening access to innovation, the Alte Leipziger team have taken a one-off, event-based approach to innovation and turned it into a thriving, always-on capability for the business.

• More than 2,000 employees utilize their Idea Management Platform, with more staff using the Wazoku Platform to communicate than using Yammer!

The approach is powered from the ground-up but supported from the top-down – Alte Leipziger’s CEO wanted the Platform to specifically link employee ideas to their successful outcomes. This means that each opportunity can be fully financed, from conception to implementation, and employees can be rightfully rewarded with monetary awards or other incentives.

“Participation and recognition are just as strong motivators for our employees on the platform as financial rewards – we had more ideas submitted to our first creative Challenge than the first one with a fixed monetary award.” // Klaudia Soroka – Innovation Management Consultant, Alte Leipziger

Through the cooperation and service provider database, Alte Leipziger could centrally store and access their different divisions’ unique partner networks: giving an easily-accessible and transparent view on who was working with who. This use case for the Wazoku Platform is as a smart library of current and potential partners, with documented learnings from other divisions all the way across the group.

To learn more about how you and your business could host, evaluate, and manage your relationships with partners or prospects, visit our Wazoku Portal page!

For Alte Leipziger, launching the platform wasn’t the end of their innovation journey, just the start. The business’s employees are truly driving a successful culture of innovation – bringing new ideas and use cases to their innovation team regularly to map exciting new possibilities.

Solver of the Month – Anteneh Gashaw

Anteneh Gashaw is an inventor, mechanical engineer, and innovator with more than 100 inventions under his belt. And more to come!

His membership of the Wazoku Crowd is just one of the many interventions and public work he is doing within the innovation space. In recent months, we’ve heard about several of his inventions, and we’d like to share some here. For a full list, you can visit his TechBriefs profile: https://contest.techbriefs.com/profile?user=89682.

Jerry Can:

We first learned about Anteneh’s JerryCan concept through an International Rescue Committee Challenge about conditions in refugee camps. Anteneh came to us with his design and also participated in a Solutions for Youth Employment (S4YE) Challenge, which is extremely promising in allowing people across the world to carry more water while reducing physical strain. Take a look: https://hackaday.io/project/178283-antenehs-jerry-can

Innovative Design for Disassembly (DFD) Gear:

Anteneh’s design includes individual ‘teeth’ of a gear that can be replaced following damage to one tooth, without any maintenance or replacement of the whole gear required: https://hackaday.io/project/191683-antenehs-dfd-gear

Anti-wildfire campfire:

Many devastating wildfires are known to be started as a result of poor camp fire management. Anteneh’s design is a small device that can meet all the requirements of a campfire while reducing the risk of wildfires: https://hackaday.io/project/191658-anti-campfire-wildfire

Emergency evacuation of wheelchair users: https://hackaday.io/project/178870-antenehs-stairs-ramp

You can view more of Anteneh’s projects here: https://hackaday.io/projects/hacker/856765

And you can get in touch with him via his LinkedIn: https://www.dhirubhai.net/in/anteneh-gashaw-777276b9/

Keep innovating Anteneh!

Organization of the Month – Desolenator

Last year, Desolenator were named as the most promising technology in reducing environmental impact in the inaugural 2023 GPID - Global Prize Innovation in Desalination (GPID). Desolenator, based in the Netherlands, was founded by William Janssen and Alexei Levene following a prototype they created in Alexei’s South Indian garden. We've researched Desolenator and wanted to bring their revolutionary desalination and solar-powered solutions to our readers' attention.

Today, Desolenator’s technology can produce 40+ cubic meters (m3) of water every hour. The business’s diverse team of 20 works from their laboratory in Maastricht and is joined by the shared passion to address the global water scarcity crisis. Their SP40 technology is the world’s first fully-circular solar thermal desalination solution, which can produce remineralized drinking water for the levelled out cost of a single m3 of water per $1 USD.

The SP40 can also work off-grid, without consumable features that may harm sustainability, like filters and membranes. The PV-T panels used are fully patented, and provide a staggering 4x gain on efficiency compared to traditional photovoltaic panels.

Desolenator is an incredible example of a leading business pushing the envelope in desalination and the sustainability of the water production space.

If you’d like to make a change and address water scarcity, you can take part in the 2024 GPID categories here: https://gpid.community.wazoku.com/discover

Act fast – the categories close on August 31st!

We hoped you enjoyed our August 2024 edition of this newsletter, highlighting innovation and exciting developments across our customers, Solvers, and our research. Follow us and subscribe to find out who the winners for next month are!