Becoming sustainable will be the great challenge for companies in the coming years and innovation will be its solution. From the first ESG Tech Day of 2024 , it is clear that the time is now ripe to move on to a new, less theoretical and more concrete phase of implementation of ESG strategies in business management. Launched in Turin at the end of 2023 by UniCredit Start Lab with the idea of presenting startups with innovative solutions in all three ESG dimensions to companies looking for stimuli for new sustainability projects, these events make clear the link that the financial group sees between innovation and sustainability.
We talked about it, right on the sidelines of the ESG Tech Day held on February 21st, with Francesca Perrone, Head of ESG & Start Lab Italy, UniCredit. “Sustainability is now a beacon for companies and part of the collective consciousness, today there is greater awareness. For UniCredit, sustainability and innovation are the engines of modernity, two sides of the same coin, because in order to mature and survive in the global scenario, companies must be innovative, but innovation can no longer be separated from sustainability”.
“On these issues, we want to be protagonists and accompany companies that develop ambitious projects towards the different sustainability transitions, which can have more environmental or more social traits, ESG factors must all be considered. We believe it is very important to pay attention to the social component: the more companies focus on sustainability, the more certain sectors and business models will be profoundly transformed or risk having difficulty staying on the market. Therefore, we need to have care and vision about people and workers who will have to rethink their skills to work in the circular economy, or in those greener and more sustainable sectors. We want to raise awareness of this type of transformation as well, and there are startups with solutions that help in this direction. The social issue is fundamental when everyone (regulators, investors, consumers) pushes for a paradigm shift, we must be careful not to leave anyone behind and make sure that everyone can participate in the transition, people and companies”.
The ESG Tech Day was a 360-degree immersion on all sustainability and innovation issues, hosting speeches by UniCredit partners and startups and scaleups on the circuit.
Develhope and Lifeed illustrated their solutions that help companies in the Social field; Sfridoo and Krill Design presented services for the circular economy; Termo talked about the challenges of energy efficiency, the law firm Legance about how to deal with the issue of sustainable governance.
“We know that innovative startups are needed to accelerate sustainability processes, on the other hand, we are well aware of the sustainability needs of companies: we want these two worlds to talk to each other more and more, for startups to speed up the sustainability dimension of companies and all individuals, of society,” continues Francesca Perrone. “On the innovation front, we rely heavily on Start Lab, which for over ten years has allowed us to identify and support the best Italian startups. Start Lab is a business platform, we make startups work with our companies, with our investors and also with our financial support.
Francesca perrone, Head of ESG & Start Lab Italy, UniCredit
In the 10 years of Start Lab’s activity , we have seen the innovation ecosystem flourish. We’ve always met solid technologies and teams, and we’ve always noticed that truly innovative startups have an absolute ear for listening to the market. Today, they naturally focus on solutions that promote sustainability. They are natively receptive companies, we work with them so that they have all the characteristics to be considered modern companies and also attract impact investors, who are growing more and more at European level. They are also extremely creative organizations and therefore excellent partners for Start Lab because with their agility they help us to give the right ideas to companies that want to do sustainability”.
In the field of ‘Open Innovation’, a critical factor has always been the dialogue between startups and large companies, organizational realities that by their nature and maturity speak different languages. Sustainability is, according to Perrone, an area that helps to overcome the gap.
“Historically, Italian startups have learned to talk to the investor first and then learned the language of big business, but the work is not done. The terrain of sustainability is the right one to talk to, because today the company is an interlocutor that actually wants to experiment and can do so with the concrete, visionary projects of experimentation of startups”.
UniCredit Start Lab’s experience with startups boasts record numbers in the Italian context: almost 8 thousand applications in ten years and 560 companies selected and entered the business platform, 75 open innovation initiatives and matchmaking moments carried out in recent years involving over 1100 leading companies and 950 investors.
For the new edition, we remind you that the call will be open until April 17th .
“We are looking for innovative ideas on all three ESG dimensions, we have always had the Clean Tech vertical dedicated to environmental solutions, but three years ago we added the Impact Innovation vertical, which wants to capture those realities that propose solutions for social strategies. We have already seen some good ones: from platforms that map migrants’ skills to find work to training platforms that focus on areas of Italy where unemployment is high or for women’s financial education. Companies need new ideas to implement their social strategies.”
“2024 will be the big bang of sustainability ,” Perrone continues, “there will be many innovations introduced by regulators, banks are required to include new risk factors, related to sustainability, in their credit assessments. This is a radical change and companies will be called upon to give more evidence of what they do in the field of sustainability, to better measure what they do to build credibility around their sustainability projects . In recent years, there has been an attempt to increase the level of awareness, but 2024 will be the year of the turning point in which many regulatory requests, but also from the market, consumers, investors, us banks as lenders, will take shape and companies will need to find solutions and therefore we must also be present with innovative startups at the right time”.
At the ESG Tech Day, UniCredit talked about the innovative ESG profiling service, born from the collaboration between UniCredit, Open-es and Cerved Rating Agency that will allow companies, by answering a questionnaire, to obtain their sustainability positioning (based on the Cerved Rating Agency methodology). “Companies need to start getting to know each other more deeply, with a methodology behind it, they can do it with these ‘scores’ that help them identify the areas where they are weakest. The score becomes fundamental for the bank or for the investor to understand if that company has the right characteristics to have access to incentives and financing”.
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