InnoWise Scale Competition - Lessons learnt

Just before summer, NEUROPUBLIC was invited to participate as one of the solution providers for the agriculture Use Case of the InnoWise Scale Competition on Water Scarcity (you can find a nice description of the competition on the REVOLVE website - the Communication partner of the Competition and did a really nice job!).

It was an international event that aimed to attract innovative companies to help SanLucar, a fruit and vegetables company based in Spain, address the water scarcity and salinity issues it faces in its apricot orchards at the area of Murcia, Spain.

Participation in the InnoWise Scale Competition

I was assigned this task and so I started working on it during the summer. There were several online meetings during this period:

• Between the organizers of the event (EIT-Food), the problem holder (SanLucar) and the solution providers (mostly companies offering various types of smart and digital farming services), explaining various aspects of the process and defining the key issues faced by SanLucar, 
• 1-1 meetings of each company with SanLucar to discuss the details of a potential collaboration, 
• Training sessions on better designing and delivering the pitch for the final day
• Numerous sessions of each company with its mentor; we were lucky enough to have Andrea Cruciani from Agricolus with us who shared ideas, insights and tips for improving our pitch.

In the meantime, I started working on the slides (visual) and my speech (audio), as the pitch would be pre-recorded using Loom allowing the concurrent recording of webcam and desktop (the slides) video feed. I had to present the context, our gaiasense smart farming system and our envisaged solution in just 4 minutes - and this seemed way too short to me.

The slides were eventually transformed and the pitch became more focused and lean (with slides and text being left out in the final version) with valuable contributions from both our mentor and our Water Resources Management expert, Dimitris.

The Judgement Day

The big day came and all solution providers completed their pitches, allowing the jury to decide on the most suitable solutions for the specific issue, with the help of SanLucar's representative for selecting the most appropriate one for the big prize and the demo of the solution in the orchards of SanLucar.

The competition was really hard and unfortunately and despite our efforts, our proposal was not among the ones awarded. But was the result that bad? 

Well, I was hoping for the big prize, that would allow us to set up another gaiasense installation in Spain (following up on the ones taking place in the context of the LIFE GAIA Sense project) and set up a potential commercial collaboration with SanLucar, a large international company, with significant perspectives.

Even the 2nd and 3rd prize would bring some (even small) financial benefit to gaiasense, financing parts of its development - technological or scientific. But what would matter most to me, due to my personal involvement and investment in both time and effort, would be the acknowledgement that what I was working on made a difference and was even slightly better compared to the competition.

Conclusions

To be honest, I hoped (and believed) that our proposal would make it in the Top-3. But for various reasons, this didn't happen.

In the end, our participation in the InnoWise Scale competition was yet another valuable lesson. What did we get from it? More than one could think:

Valuable experience from our participation in a different kind of international competition;

The selection / acknowledgement of NEUROPUBLIC by the organizers as one valuable solution provider, featured in various social media posts;

The presentation of gaiasense to a different audience abroad;

The excellent communication we had with Andrea Cruciani, our mentor and CEO of Agricolus, who is working in a similar field as our gaiasense smart farming system;

The identification of important competitors activated in Mediterranean countries.

Last but not least, we established connections with the EIT-Food team, especially with Carmen and Evgenia - which I hope that will may be useful in the near future.

So I am keeping all these as precious outcomes of our participation in the InnoWise Scale competition and will try to make the best use of them in the future.