A program that involves older people in recycling, innovation for bands in waste sorting plants, improving container reorganization… This is not a random list, but a sum of projects carried out by IDEA, the Ecoembes program which encourages its employees to embark on entrepreneurship.
Created in 2016, IDEA “is an intrapreneurship program born with the intention of promoting a culture of internal innovation,” explains Teresa Gallastegui, director of people and organization at Ecoembes. The initiative allows any employee or group of employees, regardless of their level within the company and the department to which they belong, to present a business idea linked to the company’s activity.
During their eight years of experience, they have received more than 400 proposals of all kinds. “There are very operational ideas, others which concern social projects, new processes, new technologies… We place a lot of emphasis on feedback and any idea which supports a strategic challenge of the company is likely to progress,” he says.
When talking about moving forward, Gallastegui is referring to the process that IDEA involves. And it’s not just about presenting an idea and forgetting about it. The program includes a series of phases during which employees, always with the support of the company, are confronted with typical entrepreneurship situations.
Thus, the program starts with a call, which resulted in the presentation of more than 50 ideas by employees in 2024. Of these, the IDEA committee selected ten which were presented to the steering committee, where the three finalists were chosen to begin an incubation period and, if proven viable, an acceleration.
The participants agree on the fact that getting started with IDEA is quite similar to following a practical and accelerated master’s degree in which you learn a complete process ranging from the preparation of a business plan until communicating a project. This program invites you to create transversal synergies between participants from different departments who can put their knowledge at the service of an idea.
Switch to the “entrepreneurial chip”
Smart truck is the name of the project by Juan Carlos Arranz and Isabel Tennenbaum. Their idea proposes using technology to obtain information on the volume of packaging contained in a container when it is emptied into the collection truck.
“With the pandemic, it was not possible to enter the sorting plants to carry out analyzes and we realized that we had stayed a few months without knowing what was inside the containers. With this technology, you don’t lose that information,” says Tennenbaum.
This information is very valuable because thanks to it they can know which containers are filled first and adapt the waste collection frequencies to be more efficient. It also allows you to know, by combining the volume and weight data of the container, whether said waste has been correctly sorted or not. “By knowing where the weight-to-volume ratio deviates from what it should be, you can target awareness campaigns,” says Arranz.
They came second and after two years of work they carried out a pilot test in Burgos which showed 97% reliability of the data. They are now working on an expansion plan.
If you ask them, IDEA Tennenbaum appreciates “the fact that they are betting on you and giving you this ability to be creative and innovative.” Arranz, for his part, emphasizes that entering this program “makes you change chipit opens the mind to think about solutions on a daily basis.
It’s not always a “Go”: the other side of entrepreneurship
In the IDEA program, not all proposals that go through the incubation phase receive the Go. This is what happened with Truckifythe project Jesus Espinar, Fede Bonfe and Jaime Hernández. Their idea was to take advantage of conventional freight truck routes to collect the separated containers at sorting plants and take them to the recycler.
They came third, but during the incubation phase they encountered various obstacles. The main one was the fact that the transporters had to have specific documents and titles to transport waste, which led them to reformulate their idea until proposing a logistics platform to create synergies with other transports. “With this evolution, we realized that a solution like this already existed and that it was not necessary,” explains Espinar.
Despite this, they carry several learnings in their backpack. “Failing to reach final development is a situation many entrepreneurs find themselves in in the market. All this allowed us to face meetings of backto the responses of companies in the market who told us that it could not be done or that it was already done. You realize the whole process behind developing an idea,” says Bonfe.
“The learning is that before embarking on a project, it is very important to know the problem or the need that we are covering for the client and that it is actually achievable and that it does not exist. In addition, the knowledge that you take with you, not only the professional recognition of being in the company’s showcase, but also the tools to analyze and solve projects,” summarizes Espinar.
