Five new companies have been selected to join the Electrolux Innovation Factory’s Booster Program as collaborative partners to drive open innovation at Electrolux. The announcement follows a day of “Dragons Den-style” pitches where the finalists selected from over 200 initial registrations were invited to pitch their proposals to top Electrolux management at the Innovation Factory based in Porcia, Italy. “The Booster Program’s purpose is to enable Electrolux to learn and collaborate on innovative ideas from the brightest and best out there and turn open innovation opportunities into actionable solutions. We were extremely impressed with all those who took part in our Innovation Day and look forward to our brilliant new partners joining us on our innovation journey”, said Andrea Corda, Senior Vice President of Global Connectivity and Technology. A public call was made in June this year for start-ups, university spin-offs and small businesses to propose their solutions addressing the following challenges: Smart fridges, Predictive maintenance, Waste to value, Microplastics capture, Sustainable packaging, Acoustic perception, High-resistant materials, and Reliability prediction. The companies selected as partners to drive forward their innovations are: PowerPlug (it offers a cloud based, smart-grid-aware energy management system that enables appliances to reduce consumption during peak hours and utility companies to manage their networks better), Roteax-Go (it offers machinery which uses waste heterogeneous polyolefin plastic materials as a raw matter for a revolutionary moulding process), PlanetCare (it offers a filter that can be installed in/on washing machines to stop the release of microfibers into the wastewater system by physically capturing them); PulpWorks (it offers a compostable, all-pulp-and-paper alternative to the billions of toxic plastic blister packs discarded each year), and innSono (it offers an audio-based machine learning embedded system able to estimate perceptual sound quality of either a full product or intermediate product directly on the production line). This is the second set of external innovation partners to be invited to work side by side with Electrolux employees, since the Innovation Factory’s launch a year ago. The specific open innovation initiative, the Booster Program, enables employees and external partners to connect and work together to accelerate innovation at Electrolux both from a product and process perspective.
