P&G call to startups for environmental sustainability

Green Start(up) - immagine

Reducing our impact, one step at the time

Environmental sustainability is a key pillar of our citizenship agenda. Over the last decades we made significant progress and we have in place an ambitious agenda to further reduce our environmental impact globally. In order to boost the capability to innovate, for the first time in its history, P&G Italy launches a call for start-ups with the objective of increasing its pace of innovation in the field of environmental sustainability and a call for women-founded start-ups.

The heart, the passion, and the agility of a start-up, with the scale and the impact of a global player. Sustainable innovation must be at the core of how we operate.

Paolo Grue, President and General Manager Procter & Gamble Italia

Three challenges. One common goal.

To make the best out of this initiative, we are relying on the support of LVenture Group, a leading venture capital fund in Italy, and one of the most important start-up accelerators in Europe. We invite the start-up ecosystem to provide us with ideas on innovative technology, processes, and models to improve our environmental footprint. The call, closed on May 31st 2021, was focused on three main challenges: logistics & mobility; consumer awareness; and end of life.

A joint initiative empowering female entrepreneurs working on green transition

The Women’s Forum for the Economy & Society, in partnership with P&G and the HEC Innovation & Entrepreneurship Center, launches a new initiative called #WomenEntrepreneurs4Good, a new accelerator program to equip women entrepreneurs and minority women’s enterprises with unique resources and capabilities to innovate and grow businesses aligned with the European Green Deal strategy. This online program will spark innovation and drive positive economic outcomes for women entrepreneurs through coaching, visibility, and technical support, and by giving them access to an ecosystem of global partners offering a variety of resources and business opportunities.

The best solutions, and most in line with the proposed problems, will be selected and will be able to become partners of P&G for the realization of pilot projects. This is an opportunity aimed at all start-ups without restriction, provided that they offer a solution consistent with the theme of environmental sustainability and are therefore able to propose innovative solutions to the presented problems.

The challenges

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Logistics & Mobility

LOGISTICS:

The goal of the challenge is the optimitazion of logistics processes related to transportation of products, so to reduce environmental footprint of logistics, transport and mobility, also via using sharing economy models and mechanism.

We are looking for solutions to:

  • Optimize transport management systems, combining solutions to reduce kilometers and emissions, eventually cooperating with other companies facing the same issues
  • Maximize vehicle (truck & vans) fill rate, via increasing the flexibility in operations (e.g. order and routes optimization), and minimizing empty spaces in our vehicles
  • Improve accuracy and efficacy of measure systems impact and emissions of logistics

MOBILITY:

The Goal of the challenge is to identify solutions to help us improving P&G employees mobility, in order to reduce environmental footprint

We are looking for solutions to:

  • Facilitate mobility of P&G Employees from/to P&G offices
  • Reduce environmental footprint of the company fleet used by P&G salesforce
  • Any other solution in line with challenge’s objectives.
Awareness

Consumer Awareness

P&G is fully committed to increase consumer awareness towards Environmental sustainability issues, with the aim of educating on consumers responsible consumption and best practices.

The challenge aims at finding technologies, applications, tools, and models capable of improving consumer awareness in all phases of the consumer journey: purchase, use, end of life.

We are looking for solutions to:

  • Educate consumers on responsible consumption across all phase: purchase decision, consumption, post-consumption (disposal).
  • Educate consumers on Responsible consumption depending of the Educate consumers on Responsible consumption also considering the specific characteristics of the products.
  • Incentivize and reward responsible behaviors across all phases of the consumer journey (buy, consumption and post consumption) to minimize environmental footprint
  • Measure the positive impact of responsible consumption practices and models
  • Measure the environmental footprint of consumption and waste post-consumption SCARTI
End of life

End of life

P&G is committed to reduce the impact of products’ end of life. The objective is to identify business models, technologies and process that introduce or reinforce circular economy solutions and principles.

We seek solutions to:

  • Proper management and effective disposal of production waste, excess of production and soon-to-expire products
  • Effectively manage and re-use returned products.
  • Improve rycicling processes of multi-material products (e.g. razor blades, electric toothbrushes)
  • Introduce packaging re-use technology and models
  • Introduce new supply chain management solution
  • Any other solution in line with the objectives of the challenge

Support to Women entrepreneurs

The impact of COVID-19 crisis was not felt evenly by all, with women bearing disproportionately the burden of the economic and social fallout. Women entrepreneurs have had to deal with the difficulties caused by the virus, both on the economic and family fronts. For many female entrepreneurs, the reduction in business income threatens the livelihoods of their families and studies show that about 90% of women’s businesses experienced a significant reduction in revenue as a result of the crisis.

Women entrepreneurs

An European Partnership to support Women Entrepreneurs in the field of sustainability

In the context of our Women4business daring circle, we’ve decided to take an immediate action to help mitigate the economic impact of COVID-19. We are proposing a new initiative to support and promote women’s entrepreneurship in Europe beyond the crisis. The project seeks to equip women entrepreneurs and minority women’s enterprises with critical resources and capabilities to sustain and scale businesses aligned with the European Green Deal strategy. In partnership with HEC Idea and Women’s Forum, P&G will be leading partner, supporting with resources and funds.

Women's forum

We are looking for the best italian all female startup (with at least 50% female founders). The selected team will gain access to an advisory and coaching program powered by the HEC IDEA Center of the HEC Business School di Parigi, ranked as one of the top business school in the world.

Women entrepreneurs

Coaching, training, and world class education

We seek to create an annual program to connect a selection of women entrepreneurs with capacity-building, funding and business opportunities. The 2021 initiative will involve 100+ women entrepreneurs at the kick-off phase, and will then focus resources on 10 Europe-based established enterprises in Italy, Germany and France with growth potential and a proven business model which have suffered from the pandemic and which provides innovative solutions to support the transition to a green economy.