Telefonica’s Sustainable Innovation Initiative has selected the best ideas among employees, suppliers, startups linked to Wayra and Open Future and universities that collaborate with the company to create new solutions that have a positive social or environmental impact and add value to the company.
The winning projects address the most urgent challenges facing humanity, summarized in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) established by the United Nations. These three proposals receive 30,000 euros each, as well as support and follow-up by experts from different areas of Telefonica.
“We are committed to sustainable innovation as a fundamental tool to ensure that our products and services, as well as financial benefits, provide long-term social and environmental value”, explains Elena Valderrábano, global director of Corporate Ethics and Sustainability at Telefonica. “With this initiative we also seek to promote talent and take advantage of the huge potential that technology offers. In this call, participation has increased 74% over the previous year, with 261 proposals from 16 countries. In total, we have received 600projects in these five editions”, she points out.
Three winners to create a more sustainable world
The first winning project, the smart charging station for electric scooters, aims to reuse telephone booths to provide cities with an infrastructure for parking and charging electric vehicles. This is possible thanks to the 100% passable solar floor, which generates clean energy because of photovoltaic cells integrated inside. It will be developed by the startup Solum, accelerated in El Cubo de Andalucía Open Future, an initiative of Telefonica and the Junta de Andalucía.
The second winner is a solution powered by Telefonica’s Group Device Unit (GDU), which will allow customers to offset the carbon footprint generated by the purchase of their smartphone. From the Mi movistarapp, the user will be able to invest in compensation initiatives through a tokenization process based on blockchain technology.
The third project has been jointly devised by the unit of IoT& Big data, which is part of Telefónica Tech, who will develop a system for measuring and controlling pollution levels in cities. To do this, they will create a kit consisting of self-installing suitcases on the roofs of vehicles, which contain air quality measurement sensors. These sensors will have Movistar SIMs that will send the data in real time to a platform for further analysis.