Empowerment, virtual collaboration and developing partnerships to help innovation
By: Jonathan Chan, Digital Strategy & Innovation Advisor (APAC)
Since joining Cargill, in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic, the experience has been completely virtual. From receiving my laptop, peripherals to digitally signing my contact, it’s been foreign experience even for myself to join a new organization. The pandemic, has completely upended the way we live and work globally but it’s also opened new doors and opportunities for us to innovate and solve problems. At Cargill Digital Labs, we’re a globally distributed team of technologists and futurists working together with our businesses to solve some of the most pressing challenges in the food & ag space with technology. While we have the capability to do so internally, we believe that collaboration can also bring about new and innovative solutions that we might have missed ourselves.
Globally sourcing innovative solutions with SLINGSHOT Startup Challenge
As a sponsor for 2020’s SLINGSHOT Global Startup Challenge, Cargill business leaders shared two challenge statements one from an employee health and safety perspective and another on how we could better manage the mental health of our seafarers onboard our vessels. Through SLINGSHOT, we were able to gain access to a multitude of startups with a variety of innovative solutions to help solve our challenges. Since then, we have embarked on two separate POCs to test the solutions from two startups, one from France and another from Malaysia to address our challenge statements.
Co-creating with students from the OpenNodes Campus Collective
Cargill Digital Labs together with the OpenNodes Campus Collective, launched an industry practicum to work on solving an industry challenge of port optimization using technology. Over the course of 6 weeks, a select group of students across 3 universities in Singapore partnered with a global team of mentors and industry experts from Cargill Digital Labs and Cargill Ocean Transportation. The team virtually, identified the critical pain points, brainstormed on the potential solution and finally developed a working prototype that could help to improve port orchestration across multiple stakeholders. The solution, leveraging Splinter, Cargill’s open source privacy focused platform enables users to gain greater visibility of incoming shipments while reducing the amount of communication across the value chain is presently being further developed by Cargill Digital Labs.
Empowered to connect the region virtually to foster innovation
Cargill empowers us to lead the change within the organization and I had leadership support to initiate and lead a team to host Cargill’s first Asia Pacific Technology Week where we held conversations related to technology led innovation. The completely virtual event involved speakers across 13 countries, colleagues shared how they were using technology and invited speakers gave us a glimpse into Food & AgTech trends and how their organizations where embracing the new normal. In this time of disruption, it’s more important than ever for us to partner, empower and collaborate to co-create to be able to take full advantage of the opportunities this newly connected global ecosystem brings to help innovation thrive.