A program that involves older people in recycling, innovation for the belts in waste sorting plants, improvements in the reorganization of containers… It is not a random list, but a sum of the projects that have passed through IDEA, the Ecoembes program that encourages its employees to embark on entrepreneurship.
Created in 2016, IDEA “is an intrapreneurship program that was born with the intention of promoting a culture of internal innovation,” explains Teresa Gallastegui, director of People and Organization at Ecoembes. The initiative allows any employee or group of employees, regardless of their level within the company and the department to which they belong, to present a business idea related to the company’s activity.
In their eight years of experience they have received more than 400 proposals of all kinds. “There are very operational ideas, others that have to do with social projects, with new processes, with new technologies… We put a lot of focus on return and any idea that supports a strategic challenge of the company is susceptible to progress,” he indicates.
When talking about moving forward, Gallastegui is referring to the process that IDEA entails. And this is not just about presenting an idea and forgetting about it. The program includes a series of phases, during which employees, always with the support of the company, face the situations typical of entrepreneurship.
Thus, the program starts with a call, which in 2024 involved the presentation of more than 50 ideas by employees. Among all of them, the IDEA committee selected ten that came before the Steering Committee, where the three finalists were chosen to begin an incubation period and, if their viability is proven, acceleration.
The participants agree that embarking on IDEA is quite similar to taking a practical and accelerated master’s degree in which one learns a complete process that ranges from preparing a business plan until communicating a project. This program invites you to create transversal synergies between participants from different departments who can put their knowledge at the service of an idea.
Switch to the ‘entrepreneurial chip’
Smart Truck is the name of the project by Juan Carlos Arranz and Isabel Tennenbaum. Their idea proposes using technology to obtain information about the volume of packaging contained in a container at the time of emptying it into the collection truck.
“With the pandemic, it was not possible to enter the sorting plants to do analysis and we realized that we had gone a few months without knowing what was inside the containers. With this technology, you don’t lose that information,” explains Tennenbaum.
This information is very valuable since thanks to it they can know which containers are filled first and adapt waste collection frequencies to be more efficient. It also allows us to know, by combining the volume and weight data of the container, whether said waste has been separated correctly or not. “Knowing the points where the weight-volume relationship deviates from what it should be, you can focus awareness campaigns,” clarifies Arranz.
They came second and after two years of work they have carried out a pilot test in Burgos that has shown a reliability of 97% in the data. Now, they are working on an expansion plan.
If you ask them, IDEA Tennenbaum values “the fact that they bet on you and give you that ability to be creative and innovative.” Arranz, for his part, highlights that entering this program “makes you change the chipit opens your mind to think about day-to-day solutions.”
It’s not always a ‘Go’: the other side of entrepreneurship
In the IDEA program, not all proposals that go through the incubation phase receive the Go. This is what happened with Truckifythe project Jesús Espinar, Fede Bonfe and Jaime Hernández. Their idea was to take advantage of conventional freight truck routes to collect the separated containers in sorting plants and bring them to the recycler.
They came third, but in the incubation phase they encountered different obstacles. The main one was the fact that transporters must have specific documentation and titles to transport waste, which made them reformulate their idea until they proposed a logistics platform to create synergies with other transports. “With this evolution, we realized that there was already a solution of this type and that it was not necessary,” says Espinar.
Despite this, they carry several learnings in their backpack. “Not reaching final development is something that many entrepreneurs find themselves in the market. All this has allowed us to face meetings of feedbackto responses from companies in the market that told us that this could not be done or that it was already being done. You realize the entire process behind the development of an idea,” says Bonfe.
“The learning is that before launching into a project it is very important to know the problem or need that you are covering for the client and that it can really be carried out and that it does not exist. In addition, the knowledge that you take with you, not only the professional recognition of being in the company’s showcase, but also the tools to analyze and solve projects,” summarizes Espinar.
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