 Hello, I'm Jennifer Shanker, Editor-in-Chief of the Innovator. Welcome to the session on innovation in infrastructure. So now without further ado, I'd like to introduce our panelists. We are joined by Marie Lam Fredo, CEO of the Global Infrastructure Hub, who is joining us from Sydney, Australia. Philippe Delon, Executive Vice President and CEO of Schneider Electric's Energy Management Business, who is joining us from Hong Kong. Sridhar Gadhi, Founder and CEO of Quintella, a World Economic Forum 2019 Technology Pioneer, who is joining us from Hyderabad, India. And Nielsen Kufes, Co-Founder of Nomoko, a member of the World Economic Forum's global innovators community, who is joining us from Zurich, Switzerland. So, Marie, let's start the discussion with you. You head up an organization that was specifically appointed by the G20 to look at how we can innovate infrastructure to help meet the global goals. Your organization is organizing a global challenge to entrepreneurs and innovators to see how we can innovate to make things better. Winners won't be announced until Thursday of this week. So, without giving away the store, can you give us a sneak peek at the kind of innovations that are being proposed and which you think are the most promising? Thank you very much, Jennifer. And good morning and afternoon and evening to everybody. That's really a pleasure to be with you today. So, as Jennifer mentioned, we last year as a global infrastructure hub is indeed a G20 entity, the solely G20 entity dedicated to infrastructure. Beyond the work that we're actually doing for the G20 itself on helping them to adopt new principles for Infotech, that was actually what we endorsed this year in July under the Saudi presidency, we are also working directly with the private sector as one key part of our mandate which is to bridge the public and the private sector. So, really taking into consideration that there is not enough of those bottom-up solutions that are actually really visible to policymakers, we took on the charge to really launch this InfoChallenge. So, the idea was to launch a global innovation competition for the infrastructure community. And the competition called for digital innovations that can be applied to solve economic, social infrastructure issues and build momentum towards a better infrastructure, which is another topic that we work very actively at the G20. So, we received, we started this process in September last year, we received more than almost 100 applications from over 30 countries and actually this week we'll be announcing that we'll have a finale on Thursday where we'll be announcing the winner. The InfoChallenge top 10 will be pitching their technology solutions during that event. And so, giving you a bit of a feel of what happened from running this InfoChallenge during a pandemic, which was obviously not what everybody expected when we started the competition, it's really been amazing to see the breadth of innovation that could be applied across the infrastructure industry. So, from using drones to inspect assets, AI, to ultimate design, to increasing accessibility with alternative things or using data to manage risks, better and informed decision making, we've seen really a plethora of fantastic ideas. One thing that we noticed through running the competition is that in terms of sector, energy sector and the big move towards renewable seems to have shown a greater and a faster adoption of technology than most of the other infrastructure sector. Overall, I mean infrastructure is a very low-tech adopter and it's been really in recent years really that it's led the way in technology advances in renewable energy and using AI for better human management. So, if we're looking at also what type of the issue that we are trying to solve with this with the specific ideas and with this specific startups that we've been supporting, I would say I could think about two main problems that we've been trying to address and which we've actually received a very interesting application. First is technology can help with enabling the sustainable goals for data that allows for better decision making across the entire project's life cycle. So, it enables AI and predictive analytics which helps in project prioritization and in optimizing asset performance during the ONM stage. A one example could be wastewater treatment optimization. So, there are technologies out there that can automatically optimize wastewater treatment performance in terms of quality and energy consumption. Conventionally, this would have been done more for trial and error. So, overall this new technology helps to reduce the provisional costs, reduce the risk of non-compliance with environmental regulation. It also takes out the risk of human error which is common in really highly complex and specialized processes. So, to do this, high quality data needs to be available to generate high quality analytical output. The second big issue that we've been really trying to look at and what technology could support making some changes has been really technology like that investor will get greater confidence in investing in sustainable infrastructure. So, a good example would be for digital twins. So, digital twins utilize data from IoT devices and other data sources to provide an electronic version of a physical asset which can be updated actually in real time. And for asset manager and investors, they will be greater visibility on how their assets are performing and how they can be optimized. So, that was to just give you a bit of a glance of the technology that we came across and there are actually many more. So, hopefully you could join later on this week to listen more about those pitches directly. Great. Thank you so much. So, Marie mentioned that we're seeing a lot of innovation in the energy sector. So, I think that's a great such way to you, Philippe. The energy sector is responsible for around two-thirds of the total greenhouse gases admitted around the world. So, we won't be able to tackle climate change and help solve the SDGs without your sector. What are some of the innovations that Schneider Electric is seeing? Thanks, Jennifer. Hi, everyone. Pleasure to be with everyone of you today. So, as you said, energy accounts actually for 80% of the carbon emissions. So, it's central to any SDG agenda. Remind everyone the goal by 2050 to be carbon neutral. No more carbon in anything starting with energy. So, that calls for a massive transformation and a massive transformation has to go into focused topics so that we can be effective. Our approach has been to look at where the big masses and what you see in city infrastructure is that 70% or city infrastructure accounts for 70% of the emissions. So, 70% of 80% of that problem. So, you go very quickly to the Pareto of where the problem is and where actually 55% of people are living today in cities. And by 2050, this urbanization rate is going to go to 70%. So, let's say everything is converging towards making really city infrastructure work in a very different way very fast because we have no time to act. So, we've done our homework to look at what would be the technology that are driving that transformation at a forefront of that transformation. One is digitization. Marie has been talking about it and I'll try to build on that to give her example. Second one that's actually not enough people are talking about is the move to electrification because electrification brings a much more efficient energy and can flow energy that's not carbonated and the goal is to get rid of carbon. So, in that context electrification and digitization are the two enablers of the transformation for sustainable and efficient and resilient agenda. So, let's take two examples. One in the grid, which is an important topic of the energy equation because in that whole transformation, there will be more renewable, there will be more instability in the grid and the grid has to become much more agile and we believe, thanks to digital technology, electricity or energy is very hard to store and the way to counter that is to make sure that grids become agile and grid will become agile if they get more digital so that you can get real-time data about how the grid is working, understand on the grid where points of consumption and production will be able to trade as we do kind of the internet to make it very very flexible and very agile. So, that's one field of drastic revolution where I would say post-COVID we see many utilities moving very fast to digital technology one for resilient purposes because they realize that they need to remote control those assets second for sustainability purpose. So, that's one. Then in building which accounts for 40% of the carbon footprint in the world, there is a massive revolution that's happening out of a sector that has been historically very low in innovation because very low in digitization. I think Mackinsey was doing a report a few years ago showing that the level of digitization in building was very low and therefore the level of productivity and innovation was very very low because the two correlates very well. Again in building we want to drive more electrification because it's the most efficient energy and more digitization to drive efficiency, agility and sustainability and we think the way to do it is to do to do this across the full life cycle. Again, Marie was talking about this at the beginning of the design and build phase where actually that's the starting point of driving a different agenda. There is a lot of technology happening today on simulation and in the construction phase software that would allow people to take 3D model and really do a much better job to drive construction in a very efficient manner. That's what people call beam 4D and 5D. That's a gigantic revolution that's happening now and that's cooling for faster adoption. Then you move to what we call O&M, Marie was talking about it operate and maintain phase where thanks to AI, thanks to digital there are many things we can automate in the field of building how to deal with HVAC which is 50% of the energy spent in a building so the heating and cooling, the lighting, the all water network and so on to automate the way those buildings are operating so that actually they become more comfortable, more livable but also way more efficient and more resilient because it would be remotely controlled. So a vast ocean of technology which actually can be applied in building to new build but also to retrofit. They don't have to be very expensive and you know digital in the existing building stock which is today the vast majority of what we have to deal with for the coming 20 years putting in place what we call active energy efficiency, digital technologies actually not complicated it's simplifying by the day because technology is coming AI, more cost-effective connectivity, more business model that drives more services that make us hopeful in the end that actually technology do exist today, not tomorrow. Now people might talk about let's say future technology hydrogen which maybe is going to come in 30 years meaning too late today technology around electrification and digitization are available today and really the question is how do we scale up as fast as we can to make the goal of 2050 which is an absolute must for all of us. Thank you very much Philipe. So I'd like to now move to Nielsen because both Marie and Philipe kind of touched on the importance of digital twins and simulation and so I would like you to tell us how Nemoko is tackling that issue. Yeah I mean I think this was a beautiful introduction and both of Marie and Philipe they already touched on it and I just want to give the viewership maybe a quick also conceptual overview what is actually happening on that front so the word the buzzword digital twin already has kind of fallen in that sense and this is in the end the digital infrastructure which all of this automation and bringing basically digitization to the physical world is actually the basis and the infrastructure for and as a definition of a digital twin you essentially have a digital representation of a physical object first coined by GE general electric and applied to turbines but we as a company applying this literally to entire cities or entire countries so what in the end you have is you have a digital replica meaning you have IoT data you have 3D data you have conceptual data such as for instance for a house you would have the price of a house you would have the legal data what is the zoning law of a house you would have consumption data you would have demographics traffic information which is flowing around and I think the big shift that the digital twin is bringing is to actually bring all of this data which in yen is linked to a physical place or physical location into one database which is then joined together and is also usable by many different applications so today a lot of this data is living in very different silos and different kind of sectors and different entities different companies the state has a lot of this data but the whole purpose of a digital twin is to bring this in a meaningful way together and then also make it accessible so only if this digital twin and I think this is what Murray said already very well has very good data any of the digitization and any of the automation and that at Philip talked about is actually possible because you can rely that this data is actually representing a state of a physical object or a physical infrastructure so it's super super important to make this very clear that the data which is going into this digital twin is basically the bottom line and how good any optimization and automation and digitization can be if the data is not correct then anything you automate will also not be correct and then the second part is to make this really accessible so I think I'm a big believer that today software will actually help through a digital twin to solve some of the biggest problems that we face as a society especially the problems which are linked to the physical world from and of course with a lot within the within the sustainable kind of ecosphere but also when it comes to distribution of wealth through real estate and so on but the really important part is that this has to be accessible to a lot of companies and cannot be accessible only to a few and so this has like the internet back then and kind of democratize this actual access to digital technologies this has to be accessed by a lot of people that startups large companies individuals governments alike can use this digital twin and build their solutions on top of it and build their software stack on top of that digital twin which is then the foundation of this and I think making this really accessible is going to be one big key key to success in terms of automating the physical world in terms of helping the physical world with digital tools if this is not accessible to a lot of people a lot of companies this is not going to be as disruptive as the internet was and for us as a company we really see this as the kind of comparison the digital twin is essentially the internet of the physical world as such and makes it possible to digitize in that front. Thank you very much for that fascinating overview of the near world that is that is to is being developed connecting all of our physical infrastructure. So sweetheart let's now turn to Quantella and you are very much focused on what Filipe very rightly pointed out is one of the biggest areas to tackle and that is cities and you know how to manage them more efficiently. Now there are many environmental concerns but there are also health concerns. Can you tell us how Quantella is working with cities during the COVID pandemic? Sure thank you Jennifer. Hello everyone. Technology is playing huge role in cities both efficiency as well as in the environment especially last few years there is a leapfrog growth because there is a huge adoption of IoT devices video vision and sensors. It made it it's much more maturity, adaptability and affordability of those technologies is going to really helping cities to adopt those technologies especially with COVID the digitization is going to accelerate very fast because of the COVID you know working from home or education from home or e-health there is a huge digital divide today there are 60% of the people doesn't have proper internet to study from home that's going to bring you know technology is not only going to bring opportunity but also bringing to be challenges where you need to provide equal opportunity in terms of technology for all. So I feel that there is a huge opportunity or two reasons I can tell you one it's extremely affordable unlike before where cities has to invest huge amount of money to bring those technologies there is a huge economic advantage of bringing this technology you talk about lighting philip talks about lighting by making lighting smart you can save 50% of the energy I'll give you one example in US one of the city said hey certain area of the city we are getting less academic rankings this place and they did a research they found out that certain area doesn't have internet available so kids has to go back to school to do the homework so what we did is we made lighting smart we made the savings that savings and the same infrastructure is invested making Wi-Fi freely available for the students so that's how the investments into cities can be self-sustainable where private parties can come and invest and create the value both economical environment and social and create the value and use the health when this COVID happened most of the smart city platforms all over the world really not much focused on the health when this happened the head of the country who focuses on this said that hey can you make this smart city platforms into city war room platforms so within 72 hours we made our technology platform into war room platforms which is today helping around 27 cities and two countries level as well as several state governments so what we have done is you know it's not done by one department you need so much of data collections from police department health department social welfare department disaster management how do you took all this data to monitor what's happening how do they collaborate among the different departments so that they can help citizens better how do you prevent from not happening so that you can have this lockdown zones where there's a highest spread so that you can plan it out and you can predict you know the cases and you can make sure that the health infrastructure is available at a right time so it played a huge role there as well thank you very much as follow-up question um i'd like to talk about how it's not just innovation and technology but also innovation in business models that will help move things forward and if i'm not mistaken your company's business model is based on success so if you help a city for example become more energy efficient they pay you only based on the results is that right absolutely so typical models used to be earlier cities used to invest into infrastructure then the country level said that okay we will participate to certain extent but today there is huge amount of ppp models are emerging in the technology as you rightly mentioned energy have huge amount of savings so which means that we have partnered with a fund which invests into the project anti-digitization and you operate it create one revenue models two savings and whatever the savings you make there will be shared them the value will be given back to the investor who is investing into it then after certain years city not only have to spend less they will also make more revenues because they have less cost of energy the same thing we have done for parking we have done for safety and several of them thank you and nielson i'll ask you from your company in omoko how are you enabling some new digital business models that help tie together the physical and digital worlds yeah i think um this is a really important factor right because in the end any any technology or any in that sense innovation is always only going to be as adopted as fast as you create a monetary ecosystem around it as well right so if we haven't we've seen this in the past if we have a technology or or any innovation which doesn't provide in the end business value and doesn't provide economic value adoption will be much much slower and i think for for us this all ties into having um collaborative business models or participatory business models in that sense so in the end i think the the old model where you have these giants which then in the end monetize the data which has been collected by others um indirectly i think that's something which is not going to be sustainable for these type of models so in the end if you if you also say that data collection is something which is very important the quality of data really matters you need to also incentivize the data collectors to participate in the economies of those ecosystems as well and likewise you need to have the people who in the end bring the business outcome in that sense and they have to participate as well so for us it's all about having participatory business models which then in the end also has to be chosen by the actors so if if someone is launching a product which is our solution which has a SaaS business model and pays data part of that then this is the business model they choose if someone else is choosing a business business outcome as a service model where they participate in the amount of money saved then this is the business model for that particular application but the ones who are linked to it need to participate in that particular business model tools so if you can create participatory economies or ecosystems then everyone profits in the end and then you really have a truly disruptive ecosystem where no one is exploited within that but all everyone is participating in the success i think this is how you align the interests among us thank you Nielsen Shibi let me turn to you to ask you about what kind of innovation and business models Schneider Electric has seen sure so first of all let's reminder of the past episode of what we've covered first point is really technology do exist so that's a real good point i mean we're all looking at the problem we have to solve starting from the point that technology do exist is really an exciting starting point because now really the point is how do we scale up so indeed one is to keep fueling the technology innovation there is more to come great second one is really to see how to scale up things and in that context this innovation in business model is really important on that one i would quote two examples of stuff that we've been driving at Schneider one is a business model innovation where we saw a gap of funneling money to sustainable projects i mean there are papers saying that there is a global gap of close to three trillion of invest of financing to those sustainable investment and what we did was to partner with a financial institution namely the Carlisle group to form a company where Schneider would bring the skill set and the capability to deliver projects and Carlisle will deliver funds and actually the capacity to structure bigger projects we form a company together called alpha structure and we we work together to propose our skill our combined skill set in front of big projects one of them being the the old retrofit of jfk airport in new york which actually we secured as a project where everybody wins because let's say new york city and the old state is having in front of him this time money skill sets that take full responsibility to deploy a project like this so an interesting example of real business innovation at scale second one is actually a partnership we form with walmart we have a real good practice of energy consultant that would help companies like walmart to optimize our carbon footprint and actually not only we work with walmart but we work with all the footprint of the supply of walmart because every company has to go on scope one two and three and and we went after what we call a gigaton ppa program power purchase agreement where we consulted walmart but we also help walmart help their suppliers to go after a giant goal of one gigaton of co2 saving uh for for the for the company of the old footprint which is really innovation at scale so that's technology but that's also business model so many many solutions available today from a technology standpoint and business model okay thank you very much so now let's we've talked about the opportunities we've talked about how digital and other things like electrification can help move things forward but we also have to acknowledge that in the infrastructure space there are many challenges it is hugely expensive to retrofit some things and you know who is going to pay for all of this marie what do you see as some of the the biggest challenges that have to be overcome and what is you know what what in your mind are the one or two things that industry actors could do to help overcome those challenges so um in terms of challenges obviously the situation where we are in where we don't see enough scallop sufficiently fast there's obviously a combination of challenges and it would probably mention four of them um the the first one is really about the procurement process because today when you look at an infrastructure projects it's still uh the procurement process the tender is very still unfortunately still led by um dragging down costs and despite technology could support obviously uh a cost reduction over the last span of the asset it's too often seen as a as an upfront risk that would potentially uh incurred a bit more capex but that thing also the apex vision is probably not good forward sufficiently well um so not enough incentive if you want to really put innovation within the core of this large project that will help actually to make this kind of proof of concept of scale the second one is that obviously scaling technology projects is a bit difficult uh we know that it was great to hear about the um the other projects that uh schneider electrics got with trial along gfk airport uh where they were able to work together but this is obviously one big corporate working with a large uh in tech um sorry info fund so having both like-minded objectives related to esg is trying to make it work and how then do you bridge really this kind of startups vc world with the infrastructure project is is another one another one is obviously our culture and uh uh towards innovation in our industry i mean it's really one of the main barrier is that uh you know it's really about the implementation of a technology around what will be the uncertainty of the outcomes um and generally this is a quite a risk averse our industry infrastructure as a whole uh and so obviously it is risky uh but i think it's also important especially with the challenges that we have seen uh and folding through the pandemic to start thinking differently and start embracing some other risk because we actually uh uh there are lots of ways now to quantify them a bit better uh and the last one is really they are and it's actually coming from the research that we did this year supporting the g20 infratec agenda uh that we work on throughout the year to really identify some of those barriers and one that came pretty uh uh clearly was um a especially with the public sector was about the awareness of what infratec and technology for infrastructure is all about and also education aspects uh so part of this for me there is two component to that it's uh we tried that really through the info challenge to raise awareness about what tech companies could do who they are how does it work uh and then the other thing that we did was actually to work out um use cases for technology and infrastructure that have already been proven to work and have a lot of examples already out there so we compiled the g20 60 use cases uh that are really um from all of the ai for um uh you know for example in transport currently that can even help the pandemic really um down to um you know how you could actually optimize this this this order uh throughout the entire process so 60 different use cases that's going to be published uh later on this year uh but i think that was another way to actually bring this to governments to say you might not be aware of it but that actually works so it is time for you to think about this within your procurement processes which leads me to the two actions because well we've been hearing about from from my fellow panelists about some great ideas and actually model that work so you know those challenges uh could be definitely overcome and i would say probably two call for actions in here is for governments really to streamline into their processes more innovation ask for it incentivize innovation within the bids too often even in developed countries we don't see enough of that so that requires then that the entire process for procurement is actually revised so that's actually some work so again the work we've done under g20 has hopefully informed for the case for technology and infrastructure um and then the second bit will be how do you support that i would say this valley of the death of uh the financing for technology uh between again the startups that are coming into accelerator and going into vcs and and then why do you get to the proof of concept and then get really scaled up uh by um being really utilized in large infrastructure projects so uh in there i think we've heard the model from uh from my colleague in China electric but there is also now a growing conscience about the fact that having in protect fund but actually funds that could really focus on um financing projects with a technology component strong technology component and really structure i mean actually you're risking really the technology component and support the technology development and then pairing this infotech fund we've actually some infrastructure part so there are a couple of projects that are um uh infotech fund that are in the in the make so hopefully we will see more of them in the next month that's great thank you so much Murray um so um swithor from from a startups perspective what do you see as the biggest challenge and what action would you like to see taken by the actors in the industry to make it easier for startups to collaborate with big infrastructure players so you're talking about the startups working with the corporates right that's the the challenge or the overall as a smart cities to execute the challenge actually both because uh on the one hand in order to scale uh some of these technologies i think it is going to be necessary for startups to work with large corporates on the other hand you know startups like yours are working with government so what are the challenges that you face in you know in in getting governments to um procure your services see the the first challenge when you do smart city of any urban infrastructure digitization usually it requires multi stakeholders to work together if you're working with municipality or the police it's not enough so because if you are trying once if you're trying to solve one problem you need three to four departments to work together as a nodal agency that's one challenge which at a policy level has to be solved second there is still concern of security and data privacy there is huge value for cities to create open data platform open it for startups like us to create very innovative business models but the policy making is still not firm i know world economic forum is working on creating the global data policy that still is not firm so once it is done there is a huge opportunity and the third is interoperability because every technology people developed by startups talking different language so interoperability and having a standard language is also very important coming back to startups working with the corporates working with the government what we have done is we partnered with major system integrators we partnered with major oems like sysco hp so they go to the customer and our technology becomes part of their technology suddenly when i work with companies like sysco 10 000 sales organization of them is trying to sell my technology because i'm complementary to them i'm providing my complementary technology embedded in their technology great thank you nils and i know open data platforms is close to you um and so if you have something to add on that please please do but also you you're working with the real estate industry and other um actors in the infrastructure space what would you like to see changed yeah i mean i think um to add to this i mean the the big change needs to happen is the affordability and i think this goes into the whole question of scale right and the the possibility you don't have to run through poc's and all of this it just has to get much more commoditized much more productized i think this is what i want to see from the startups and to have these products up and running ready and that then you can also easily implement them into those into those infrastructure projects and i think this is exactly what we're doing with the the real estate industry where in the end we said we cannot have a customer's solution for every single um real estate owner or for every single year for every government um this really has to be a standardized product which can be rolled out also basically out of the box right this this cannot be a thing where then you have to customize this with every single solution but it has to be um productized enough and to roll it out fast um i just want to add to the to the governments i think there's um for us we see this in a way that the governments are partners and they're not clients they're partners because we as a startup we're not focusing on on getting government contracts running if the government is the one who's paying in the end for that infrastructure i think we're going to have a very long run at implementing them i think you have to provide enough value to the private economy there is players who say you know what this is valuable enough for me as a private player within this um the government is part of that because they provide a lot of data and there's a lot of legislative kind of issues as well because in the end if you really automate on a city's scale some of those parts it becomes a question of of legal liability so if you automate traffic flow for instance and in the end there is a massive traffic jam happening is it your liability as a company who automated that or is it maybe someone else's fault and um so that's where we see governments much more as partners than as financial contributors to this ecosystem so we'd like to take from a financial point of view the governments out see them as partners data providers um legislation providers if necessary um but the private economy needs to have a use case which is productizable and monetizable enough that um this can basically work without the government's intervene thank you um we're getting close to the end philly do you have anything that you want to add real quickly there in terms of a challenge yeah or maybe call to action because we we are close to the end just to be super practical so we've talked about a lot of stuff but on our side maybe two points we would like to highlight one clearly that scale up will not happen without a massive ability of companies to collaborate together work together big companies with big companies big companies with government and big companies with smaller startups especially i would say that piece of the two type of companies a smaller nimble and the bigger one from time term less nimble is in my view a critical part so a call to action and actually a call for help for any anybody that's watching us and that would like to engage with schneider we have a dedicated team called innovation at the edge which can either invest or support those companies we are hungry to engage more uh as schneider and we really welcome so you have my name you can contact me on linkedin and i'll pass you uh i'll put you in touch with my colleague who is driving that but be called call to action here and we want to drive more collaboration and more ecosystem number one number two uh for people who are watching us who are business leaders i just would like to insist that we have all a personal and i would say moral responsibility to transform we always like to look at government and my neighbor and whatever personally we all have a role to play to transform and take responsibility so for people who are business leaders we as schneider believe that our duty is to drive sustainability and to help our customer do so so if you're a ceo of a small company mid-sized company big company we want to be on your side to help you drastically reduce your carbon footprint and we believe we have the capability to help you there and we are passionate about that that's what keeps me up at night every day that's what makes my job super exciting and we want to make sure that we can broadcast those capabilities and really engage with as many companies as we can to scale up that race against carbon as fast as we can um okay so um i thank you very much philippe we have um we have had a fascinating perspectives from our panelists make sure to tune in uh to infrage channel infrage challenges uh on uh thursday to find out about the new types of global innovations that are being developed on infrastructure and i hope that our participants are taking to heart the um the call for actions from our startups and from schneider electric thank you all for joining