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Almacube revolutionises sustainable innovation for Phillip Morris

The context

Almacube is the incubator, accelerator and innovation hub of the University of Bologna and Confindustria Emilia Area Centro. The company helps regional economic growth by incubating startups and providing acceleration programs as well as different services.

Almacube was contracted by a major tobacco brand (Phillip Morris) in order to find innovation for their operations from a sustainability perspective. Before Novable, they always used traditional scouting tools like Google, Crunchbase, and venture capital portfolios. For this reason, the search represented a slow and tedious process. 

Therefore, Almacube decided to give Novable a try, being a dedicated scouting platform. In this way, they were able to work with a higher level of accuracy and relevance, finally receiving better results and saving quality time.

startup scouting for corporate innovation

The objective

Almacube referred to Novable with the intent to generate a qualitative and comprehensive list of potential innovation providers of sustainable processes. This was necessary to reduce their reliance on raw input for manufacturing as well as develop environment-friendly business models. Specifically, the research covered three main topics: 

  • Noise management and employee well-being,
  • Clean energy and environmental impact reduction,
  • Circular economy: reuse of industrial waste.

The challenge

Almacube needed to save time and resources. They partially delegated the scouting process of 1 of the 3 challenges to free up time and human capital. In this way, they were able to focus on the organisation of innovation challenges. Moreover, they wanted to improve the quality of the results obtained by their previous scouting efforts and find their hidden gems.

The role of Novable

Hybrid AI-Human approach: Using NLP to understand Almacube’s needs via a detailed briefing from them, AI did the heavy lifting by retrieving relevant Companies. On the other end of the spectrum, the Novable Agents sifted through the output for quality control and delivered a tailor-made “Golden Basket’ (list of Companies)’. The Novable Agents helped adjust the process according to the customer’s evolving search criteria. Results matched the increasing level of details requested throughout the Campaign.

Semantic search: Direct translation of Almacube requests into relevant results for each chosen topic.

Iterative process until happiness: Results become more targeted between each bundle delivery. The Novable Agents worked until the customer had achieved his objectives, regardless of the time spent.

Startup Scouting for Corporate Innovation with Novable

A successful outcome

Thanks to Novable, Almacube:

  • Found 124 Companies from which 78 +135 were relevant to their search (match), and 9 were contacted directly by Almacube innovation officers. 
  • Customer Cost vs Customer Gain
    • Cost. Time: 72 hours + 1 FTE. Money: ± 2000€
    • Gain. Time: 5 hours (Iteration review time x number of iterations). Money: the price of a starter campaign (600€ custom price) for 9 hours of platform usage.

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