The Innovator's Radar newsletter enables you to stay on top of the latest business innovations. Enjoy this week's edition.
Jennifer L. Schenker
Innovator Founder and Editor-in-Chief |
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On March 5 newcleo, a European nuclear technology company developing Generation IV reactors that use nuclear waste as fuel, and Viaro Energy, a London-based independent upstream energy company, announced that they are partnering to use low-carbon nuclear technology to decarbonize the oil and gas sector. The news is a testament to the growing recognition that the pathway to Net Zero will be faster if nuclear power is part of the solution. The deal comes just two months after world leaders at COP28 agreed that the provision of nuclear energy should be accelerated as part of the mix with low-carbon sources of energy and just two weeks before the March 21 Nuclear Energy Summit 2024 in Brussels which will be co-chaired by International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi and Belgium's Prime Minister Alexander De Croo. World leaders attending the first-of-its-kind nuclear energy summit are expected to discuss how to overcome opposition from Germany and a small number of other nations to using development banks to fund nuclear projects. Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business. |
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| India’s e-commerce market is expected to reach$ 350 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 23%. Now the founder of the country’s first e-commerce company, Abhay Deshpande, a serial entrepreneur who also founded Martjack, India’s first SaaS company, and four partners are building the market for what they believe is the Next Big Thing: waste commerce.
Recykal, a Hyderabad-based company, is the operator of the country’s biggest B2B digital marketplace. The platform uses a matching engine to connect buyers (recyclers) with sellers in categories such as plastic, paper waste, electronics, and metals. The vision is to build a self-sustaining circular economy in India.
A circular economy is a regenerative approach to production and consumption, in which products and materials are redesigned, recovered, and reused to reduce environmental impacts. Research shows that the transition to a circular economy could generate $4.5 trillion in additional economic output globally by 2030 but progress has been slow. According to the Circularity Gap Report 2022 of the 100 billion tons of materials which enter the global economy every year, only 8.6% are cycled back into the economy. This leaves a massive circularity gap of over 91% which needs to be addressed with concrete action.
Recykal, a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, and a member of its UpLink open innovation platform, is making inroads with a made-for-India business model. The country produces 65 million tons of waste every year, which is estimated to go up to 165 million tons by 2030 and 436 million tons by 2050. Currently some four million sellers make a living from waste streams in India but much of it takes place informally, in the offline world. “We saw an opportunity, through the use of technology, to introduce transparency, traceability and compliance,” says Chief Strategy Officer Anirudha Jalan, a former investment banker at Morgan Stanley.
“The sellers are fragmented so we act as aggregators of waste,” explains Jalan. “What we try to solve for in the marketplace is consistency of supply and quality of supply for corporate buyers like Tata or Reliance while solving for transparency and traceability.” |
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Who: Andrew Ng is the Founder of DeepLearning.AI, Managing General Partner at AI Fund, Founder & CEO of Landing AI, Chairman and Co-Founder of Coursera, and an Adjunct Professor at Stanford University. Over 8 million people have taken an AI class from him. He previously worked as the founding lead of the Google Brain team, which helped Google transform into a modern AI company. Ng served as VP & Chief Scientist at Baidu, where he led a 1,300-person AI team responsible for the company’s AI technology and strategy. He is also the former director of the Stanford AI Lab, home to 20+ faculty members and research groups. In 2023, he was named to the Time100 AI list of the most influential AI persons in the world. Ng now focuses his time primarily on his entrepreneurial ventures, looking for the best ways to accelerate responsible AI practices.
Topic: The state of AI and how organizations can best make use of it.
Quote: "Almost all knowledge workers can become more productive right away by using a large language model like ChatGPT or Bard as a brainstorming partner, copyeditor, tool to answer basic questions, etc. but many people still need to be trained to use these models safely and effectively. If you have not done so already it is worth upskilling your workforce. I also encourage CEOs to learn to use these tools themselves, so they can lead from the top." |
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| Cyclize, a spin-off from the University of Stuttgart, has developed a technology to defossilize the chemical industry by using mixed plastic waste and CO2 as raw materials to produce synthesis gas, a fundamental building block for advanced chemicals that is used in making plastics, methanol, foams, adhesives, paints, hydrogen, and e-fuels. Syngas – a market worth over $60 billion globally – is currently made with fossil resources such as natural gas or coal. Cyclize’s plasma technology allows the reforming of waste plastics into a green type of syngas, a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can ultimately be used to create new products, says CEO and Co-founder Maike Lambarth. This approach has the potential to mitigate CO2 emissions as well as plastic waste pollution, she says, as the plastic used is what is normally burned in incinerators. Depending on the desired product, the company’s process can be carbon negative by using carbon dioxide as feedstock, helping companies reach emission goals. |
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Size of the budget India approved on March 7 to invest in artificial intelligence projects, including the development of computing infrastructure and large language models, the government said in a statement. The money will also be used for funding AI startups and developing AI applications for the public sector. India's artificial intelligence market is projected to reach $17 billion by 2027, growing at an annualized rate of 25%-35% between 2024 and 2027, according to IT industry body Nasscom.
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