Joining forces to develop innovative solutions

Most companies typically try to solve problems internally, but the best ideas can sometimes come from outside. 

That is the core tenet of open innovation - a demand-led approach to problem-solving where corporates launch an open call to tap on external sources, typically SMEs and startups, to jointly develop new and innovative solutions. 

The open innovation approach offers a win-win solution for all involved, said Tan Boon Kim, Enterprise Singapore’s (ESG) executive director for startup and innovation ecosystem. Companies can tap on a bigger pool of talent for possible solutions, turbo-charging the innovation process. At the same time, solutions providers get the chance to develop new products and burnish their portfolio of products and solutions. This puts them in good stead to scale their operations both locally and overseas.

“For open innovation to succeed, corporate demand drivers need to be open about sharing their pain points so that they can better crowdsource for relevant solutions. Solution providers can then validate their ideas with industry partners, instead of imagining industry needs in silo,” added Tan.

To facilitate such collaborations, Enterprise Singapore and the Infocomm Media Development Authority (IMDA) set up the Open Innovation Network (OIN) to provide a single gateway to the open innovation ecosystem in Singapore. Innovators, startups or enterprises can use the OIN to search for relevant challenges to join, and seek out co-development and test-bedding opportunities with larger enterprises.

ESG also launched the Southeast Asia Open Innovation Challenge (SEA OIC) at the Singapore Week of Innovation and Technology (SWITCH) 2021 in early November. Into its second run, the SEA OIC featured leading corporates from Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam.

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The Business Times caught up with three companies to learn more about the benefits of open innovation.

SG Enviro 

A successful pilot project has led to a host of new opportunities for water tech company SG Enviro. 

The company answered a call by ESG and the Environmental & Water Technology Centre of Innovation in 2019 to develop water management solutions. The open innovation call partnered SG Enviro with corrugated paper product manufacturer Trio Packaging for a collaborative pilot trial. 

Trio Packaging was looking for a solution to treat wastewater generated from carton box printing. Meanwhile, SG Enviro had developed an industrial wastewater treatment process which makes use of advanced oxidation to remove most organic pollutants without introducing hazardous substances into the water. 

“We spent considerable time at Trio to understand their issues and processes,” said SG Enviro managing director Guah Eng Hock. “Most factory and production facilities do not allocate much space for ‘non-production’ spaces, such as wastewater treatment. Furthermore, while clients are the experts in their own processes, they seldom pay much attention to the waste or wastewater that they generate.”

While other types of water treatment processes typically target specific types of pollutants, SG Enviro’s technology can treat a wide range of organic pollutants, and is also good for odour removal and de-colouration of wastewater. “There is also an added benefit of sterilising bacteria in the waste water, depending on the type of radicals generated,” said Guah, who founded the company in 2018. 

SG Enviro, which now has 26 staff and six general workers, has secured several projects after its successful pilot with Trio Packaging, including building a wastewater treatment facility for a waste oil recovery factory in Batam, as well as a design and build contract for a plastics recycling wastewater treatment plant (with recycling and waste management company Wah & Hua). 

SG Enviro is expected to generate sales of about S$3 million this year, with revenue likely to double next year due to the completion of some projects. Guah said the company intends to focus on expanding in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, and is also keeping an eye on the Chinese and Taiwanese markets.

Datature

Machine learning startup Datature took flight - quite literally - after taking part in an open innovation challenge.

The startup, which provides platforms for training and deploying machine learning models easily and swiftly, bagged the top prize at the Rolls Royce Data Innovation Challenge in March 2019. The competition called for teams to make use of data to enable better decision-making in flight scheduling, flight planning, and maintenance scheduling. 

The Datature team impressed the judges with a highly scalable application programming interface (API) that applied deep learning methods to flight data in order to optimise flight performances.

“Prior to the Rolls-Royce Data Innovation Challenge, we weren't even incorporated as a company, we were joining a bunch of hackathons and calls-for-proposals, trying to identify and validate issues within the machine learning scene here in Singapore,” said co-founder and chief executive Goh Keechin.

“Our solution was developed alongside a data team within Rolls-Royce - we iterated over many potential ideas (and learnt about) the frictions they face while interfacing with their massive silos of data,” he added. “There were issues surrounding data privacy and limitations of data access during our prototyping phase - thus we had to augment a bunch of data with limited knowledge.”

The company was awarded a cash prize of US$10,000 for winning the challenge, as well as a S$50,000 grant from ESG and a follow-on contract to digitalise Rolls Royce’s internal processes. 

Datature then went on to clinch the top prize - winning another S$50,000 - in the sector category at SLINGSHOT 2019, a pitching competition organised by Enterprise Singapore for startups to showcase themselves to global and regional investors. 

The company launched its platform in April 2021 and now services 680 clients across 44 countries. Its technology helps companies build complex computer vision capabilities to automate visual tasks such as damage inspection, identifying crop health, drone tracking, and more. 

“We grew from a small platform, to offering a comprehensive end-to-end machine learning pipeline for customers,” said Goh. “We aim to democratise access to machine learning processes for citizen data scientists, data teams, and companies looking to leverage such processes as part of their digital transformation.”

Aimazing

With the retail sector among the hardest-hit by pandemic control measures over the past two years, tenants and landlords have become even more conscious of the need to improve customer experiences and drive sales. 

Retail tech firm Aimazing’s digital tenant management platform has been a key enabler for property conglomerate Hong Leong. Amid the COVID-19 crisis, the property firm was looking for a solution that would allow more effective communication with tenants hit hard by the crisis, improve data collection, and ultimately deliver better customer experiences.

Aimazing took part in the Southeast Asia Open Innovation Challenge organised by ESG in February this year, which saw more than 300 applicants from 38 countries present innovative solutions to solve pressing challenge statements from large companies. Aimazing was one of five participants to be matched with participating conglomerates. 

As part of the tie-up, Aimazing installed proprietary devices at Hong Leong’s Singapore tenants, allowing the landlord’s management team to achieve real-time sales visibility across all tenants.

“The aim was to provide real-time sales visibility for Hong Leong to make informed data-driven decisions on tenant management, rental subsidies, and allow them to work better with their tenants,” said Aimazing chief executive Jun Ting. 

“Aimazing’s (solution) allowed Hong Leong to replace the outdated, time-consuming and tedious tenant management process with a seamless, cloud-based data management platform, achieving 100% data completeness and accuracy, without the need for costly and tedious point-of-sales integration,” he added.

Aimazing developed its proprietary technology in 2018, in response to “a huge gap in the retail market, as valuable offline transactional data was being trapped within the fragmented point-of-sales market, and underutilised by retail players”. The company’s solution allows retailers to automate a range of processes, including parking coupon redemption on mall apps and tenant management.

“Our growth is centred around enabling physical malls to receive data and act as fast as online players,” said Jun. The company is headquartered in Singapore, and has more than 20 team members across the region with a presence in Malaysia, the Philippines and Taiwan. It intends to break into the Indonesia and Thailand markets in the coming year. 

For more of our SWITCH 2021 coverage: go to bt.sg/switch21