Numa Launches First Asian Datacity Program in Bangalore, India
Numa, an international innovation and learning hub headquartered in Paris, has launched its first ‘Datacity’ program in the Asian region in Bangalore. It is being done in collaboration with Suez (French utility company doing water treatment and waste management), BWSSB (Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board) and the Government of Karnataka.
Numa launched the first edition of the open innovation program Datacity in Paris in 2015. So far more than 40 challenges have been addressed in Paris, Casablanca, Berlin and Barcelona.
Datacity is a 7-month long open innovation program that aims at bringing together the City of Bangalore and the Corporates to co-create a problem statement, to identify relevant innovative startups from a pool of applications and to experiment the solutions that are crafted using data provided by the city of Bangalore and the corporates.
The areas of opportunity that could be explored during Datacity are- Smart Mobility, Water and Waste Management, Energy, Smart Buildings, Transparency & Security and pollution management. The selected startups will be given Rs. 150,000–200,000 to try out their solution directly in the urban setting.
“70% of the world’s population will be living in cities by 2050. We need to address today our urban challenges to build the cities of tomorrow. Numa designed Datacity to help creating these concrete solutions with the potential to be replicated and scaled across cities of the global Datacity network,” said Souad Tenfiche, CEO Numa Bangalore
“Growing cities are facing tremendous challenges in terms of services and infrastructure provision. We must join our forces to find solutions. Collaboration is key to innovation: it is the smart collaboration that will help build smarter cities,” said Gaurav Gupta, IAS, Principal Secretary to the Government Dept.of Information Technology, Biotechnology and Science & Technology. “Our role in government is to provide a framework for these experiments. Even if it is successful to a limited extent this is going to open vistas for the future.”
“Datacity represents an interesting opportunity to test innovative solutions in line with local issues and priorities, leverage private data for the benefit of public good and work closely with the innovation and smart city ecosystem,” said Tushar Girinath, IAS, Chairman, Bengaluru Water Supply and Sewerage Board.
“Our collaboration with Numa has been to support the Group’s digital strategy for the development of resilient and sustainable cities. Suez participated in the Datacity open innovation program, organised since 2015 by the Numa incubator with the City of Paris, the French State and private sector companies, which aimed to meet the challenges of cities with the help of data. The program transformed Paris into a gigantic playground to test new urban solutions devised by entrepreneurs through the use of existing data. In 2017, Datacity went international and launched its first edition of Datacity Casablanca with Lydec as its partner. In India, we want to engage in open innovation program wherein we want to build a collaborative ecosystem involving customers, innovative start-ups, experts, researchers and our team to work together to develop solutions. This is the main objective of our partnership with Numa,” said Shyam J Bhan, MD and CEO, Suez India BA.
“We are not just a financial sponsor but we are looking to find some great ideas here and through Suez Ventures we can take them to market. We have a special connect with the city.” added Bhan. “We are also looking at opportunities for Suez Ventures to take an equity participation in a startup.”
Suez Ventures, launched in 2010 to invest in new water and waste technologies, makes initial investments of 0.5 to 2 million Euros in a project. It has already invested in Nextalim, Prodeval, Cogebio, Intent Technologies Hydrelis, Etia and Optimatics.
Suez has been in India for over 40 years with around 300 project references. Its largest operating capacity is in Mumbai and Bangalore. The company’s association with Bangalore started in 1999. The water treatment plant in TG Halli has been built by the company for BWSSB. According to Bhan, leakages in the water distribution network are a problem that needs urgent attention. Nearly 45 to 50 percent of the water is non revenue water. Bangalore ranks second in terms of non revenue water or water that is unaccounted for *. “A lot of innovation possible in the distribution network. We are doing some of that stuff here in Bangalore, where we do not have to dig up cities to do leak detection,” he said.
