Marga Hoek, founder of Business for Good, shares real-world examples of companies using technology to advance the UN Sustainable Development Goals. She includes both successes and failures in her work because unsuccessful attempts teach as much as wins.
Maybe walk us through some of your favorite use cases and examples that you've covered in the book that kind of showcase a blueprint for how we can leverage technology for advancing sustainability and development goals.
Yeah, with pleasure. And it's good that you mentioned that because I often find when I do keynotes and I meant, and I, and I experienced that with the trillion dollars ship book already, that people absolutely love those cases because we can share all kinds of technology. But when you share real life cases of companies that have done it, and of course not everything is a success. So I don't want to share only cases that become a huge success. I mean the failures are not failures because there were attempts from which we learned.
So they're learnings.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they're learning. So it's about that. But the concrete cases helps people and it's also the storytelling that's behind those cases, which is inspiring. So throughout the new book Tech for good, we have 75 real life business cases described. All of those cases apply one or several of these advanced technologies of the eight groups that we just described and for every case we describe, what is this company doing? How is it applying certain or a number of technologies, what is the impact of it on the sustainable development goals? So we mentioned the specific SDGs that you can abbreviate them in every case. And what does it do in real life? You know, how much impact does it have, how does it grow and what does it do? And you asked me to mention a couple of those cases. That's always difficult. Now I have to choose from so many cases, but I'll mention a few. Let me just go through quickly through a couple of examples. For instance, Capgemini, which is a financial services company headquartered in France, but a global company, they aimed to preserve the Mojave Desert in the US and they partnered. And this is also typical for companies that are forward thinking in terms of sustainability and technology partner with surprising organizations. In this case the Nature Conservatory in Nevada. And they created with a combination of text algorithms to trace paths and outside paths areas to estimate the erosion as to make sure to take timely action. So that's one thing. Also important with artificial intelligence, we can get huge amount of data, analyze them, make them actionable and then take action. Can't without the technology. Another company is redrtech, who is 3D printing from waste. I mean that's such a simple thought, huh? We can 3D print, but why use natural resources for it? Let's focus on the technology to change that into printing from waste. And quite some early startups in Africa, for instance, use that technology or in regions where we unfortunately still have a lot of waste, like India, to apply that principle to clean up the land in a way and for new products, because not only is that impactful and has a low cost, but also it creates an awareness to think about value rather than waste. So has that impact. And for instance Micride Infinite in Kenya in Africa they use 3D printed prototypes to support surgeons. Had they not had Access to the 3D printed prototypes, they wouldn't be able to do those surgeons. But this is a help way of educating them and now they can. FRAM Lab in New York is an initiative which is very creative. It's actually 3D printed homes for the homeless, but it's done in a vertical way. And it's like 3D printed cells that might sound unattractive, but it's actually not ugly at all throughout the city. And because it's vertical, it needs very little space and the costs are way lower than building anything else. And that way we can secure much more homes, especially in the winter for the homeless. Interface, a carpet tile company listed company in the US went on a mission zero early on, achieved it and then set out to boost innovations, help with the technology to be a positive impact in the world. Yeah, I talk a lot about as you know and for instance that project Climate Takeback is a technology that takes out carbon from the air via an ingenious process, creates granules for it as a resource for carpets and then uses it. So this whole carbon removal market is growing rapidly. As you know, Croatia has a web platform and a mobile app called Freewire for mapping free drinking water locations around the world. Sounds very simple but very much needed. Well, the list goes on. I can mention much more cases, but let me pause here.
