Rainmaking To Accelerate Its Open Innovation Platform In 2021 To Tackle Decarbonisation And Supply Chain Resilience

Rainmaking, a global venture development firm, is seeking to accelerate its cross-industry, open innovation platform to tackle maritime decarbonisation and supply chain resilience in 2021.

Rainmaking Transport’s open innovation platform first set up in Singapore in early 2020, seeks to foster accelerated collaboration between major industry players, such as Vale Shipping and various technology startups, to develop innovative solutions that can be adopted to facilitate maritime decarbonisation.

The platform has now run virtually allowing for global collaboration despite lockdowns. In 2020 alone, Rainmaking was able to scan over 4,000 startups within the spaces of Decarbonisation and Resilience.

One key challenge Rainmaking seeks to tackle in 2021 is to bring more actors together, getting customers and the industry decision-makers to view problems from the same perspective and work toward common goals.

Tarun Mehrotra, Director, Trade & Transport at Rainmaking said: “While in the early part of 2020, the world was focused on overcoming the immediate health threats of COVID-19, as the year wore on, this ‘black swan’ event highlighted the vulnerabilities of global business systems and supply chains. The importance of Rainmaking’s mission to tackle these challenges has become ever more apparent.”

“New regulation and changes to the maritime industry are often reaction-driven. Facing climate change is among the first instances where the industry is coming together to get ahead of the curve,” says Mehrotra. “The industry doesn’t simply want to just decarbonise to meet a regulatory law or regulatory driver. We recognise the biggest threat the world faces is climate change. We want to be proactive.”

Guilherme Brega, Head of Vale Shipping “Rainmaking has been an essential partner in augmenting Vale Shipping`s innovation pipeline. Thanks to both the Decarb and Supply Chain Resilience tracks, we have been engaging several start-ups with promising results, not only in decarbonisation, but also operational safety and other areas of interest.”

Matt Heider, CEO of Nautilus Labs, an innovative startup involved in Rainmaking’s Decarbonisation program said, “Digitalisation is the foundation of decarbonisation – with every byte of data used to make better decisions, we move a little bit closer to that ultimate outcome. As we enter 2021 and the post-COVID era, greenhouse gas reductions continue to come to the forefront for every stakeholder, and digital transformation is the only way we’ll fully achieve them.”

Rainmaking is confident that its open innovation platform will serve as a conduit to industry-wide collaboration and cross-company co-operation in 2021.
Source: Rainmaking