Matchmaking adopters and innovators in the ile de France

Whilst the core activity at the Solar Impulse Foundation is to identify the solutions that can be used to accelerate the ecological transition, it’s also important to help people find these solutions in a more proactive manner.

To that end, this week we will be hosting, with the Regional government of the Ile de France, the second edition of the Business Meetings de la Transition Verte - an event focused on matchmaking between solution providers and innovators.

And the real beauty of this event is its simplicity: Over the course of a single morning, we are able to organize some 400 15-minute meetings - pre-qualified, meaning that those who meet with one another have actively agreed to do so in advance - between buyers and innovators, knowing that there is likely to be a shared interest to work together.

The sectors they touch on are wide-ranging - energy efficiency, heating and cooling in buildings, mobility, energy production and storage, reducing water use, cutting down on waste - and in this case all the buyers and technologies come from the Paris Region, meaning that it supports the regional economy.

This helps local innovators to engage with audiences they might otherwise not. It helps the Paris Region and private buyers source a good number of pre-qualified solutions, and it helps us at the foundation to advance our cause of accelerating solution uptake.

This kind of work is critical to demystify the technologies that are available and realise what kind of benefits they could achieve by implementing some of them. There are a whole host of barriers that need to be worked through - legislative, financial - but often the first is recognising what is actually out there and what can be achieved if you make use of them. That’s where we are hoping to be useful.

We will be running a similar event in Grenoble, the 2022 European Green Capital, at the end of April.