A New Approach to Delivering Innovation in the Food System

INNOVATIVE TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS TO REAL-WORLD PROBLEMS IMPACTING BUSINESSES, NGOs AND GOVERNMENTS IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD

MISSION

We tackle the world's biggest problems.

We focus on cutting edge R&D, software development and product delivery in the developing world with a strong commercial focus to ensure lasting impact. Whether our users are farmers, businesses or policy makers, we build tools to address their immediate problems to deliver measurable and scalable impact.

OUR FOCUS

Sectors we are

passionate about

Improving agriculture in the developing world is one of the most critical social and environmental challenges we face. There is a huge opportunity to drive economic development and protect the environment. But we need a fundamental change in how innovation is approached and delivered.

Optimising Disease Control Strategies

Crop pests and diseases reduce global yields by 20-40% with this burden being most harmful in the developing world. We focus on delivering step change innovation and impact at three critical stages: Early warning systems and surveillance optimisation, outbreak modelling and management, and disease burden monitoring, using cutting edge stochastic epidemiological modelling, remote sensing, and software development.

Transformative Data Generation

A major limitation for decision makers is a lack of reliable real-time data about informal food systems. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent to improve manual data collection, but step change innovation is possible. Other industries that benefit from big data do so through passive data generation by designing products for end-users that generate unprecedented insights into complex systems. Many problems in developing world agriculture are amenable to this approach. Moreover, advances in remote sensing and predictive modelling have huge potential to bridge the gap from sparse datasets to high resolution insights.

In cases where active data generation is still the best approach, significant efficiency improvements can often still be made. We design data platforms and protocols to maximise the use of limited surveyor capacity, whilst also assessing opportunities for step change innovation.

Supply Chain Optimisation

In developing countries, 31% of food is lost between harvest and retail. We develop computational models of supply chains along with data platforms to expose key issues and enable scenario planning. We work closely with local businesses and governments to iteratively deliver measurable improvements.

Maximising Yield and Minimising Environmental Impacts

In sub-Saharan Africa, the difference between current and potential yield is as high as 80%. This low productivity means the majority of increased production comes from increasing the amount of agricultural land, which destroys natural habitats and increases carbon emissions in the process. Sustainably addressing the yield gaps in sub-Saharan Africa and beyond is one of the most important challenges facing the global food system.

Spatial modelling frameworks can help identify the best opportunities to increase yield whilst reducing input requirements and environmental damage. We work with key stakeholders to operationalise these predictive frameworks, to test, iterate and validate their potential in real-world deployment scenarios.

Who We Work With

We work with businesses, NGOs, academia, and governments at every stage of the innovation and delivery process.

We find opportunities to rapidly prototype and validate the potential for step change innovation impacting your business and the food system at large.

Businesses

Our approach to innovation puts the user at the heart of the process, whether the users are farmers, scientists or policymakers.

NGOs and Governments

Do you have a technical innovation that has significant potential? Work with us to evaluate the best strategy to maximise impact in the real world.

Academia

OUR SERVICE

Our Innovation and Delivery Framework

OUR SERVICE

Our Innovation and Delivery Framework

Who is the end user and what is their problem? What are the potential commercial approaches to ensure long term financial sustainability?

Product-Market Fit Assessment

What is already understood about the problem? Where are the uncertainties? What data is available? What level of R&D is necessary to validate a potential solution?

Technical Audit

Define the core innovation approaches and what is required to validate or invalidate each approach in relation to the user defined problem. Outline the pathway from validated MVP to scale, including stakeholder and commercial requirements and assumptions at each stage.

Innovation and Delivery Roadmap

Technical R&D and infrastructure development. Rapidly validate/reject/iterate the approaches defined on the roadmap. Beta test with end users.

Technical Development and Validation

Measure adoption rates and user response. Validate/invalidate assumptions around value to end-user. Validate initial commercial model and define growth strategy and later stage revenue diversification approaches.