Page 29 - Demo Faces

For innovators who have good ideas for getting that carbon out of the sea, getting in front of the right people at ADB can be a challenge. Equally, for ADB project managers, identifying suitable partners for bringing in the innovative solutions to big climate change problems can be like nding a needle in a haystack.
To solve this mismatch, Peters and
his colleagues set up a project that they called the Big Blue Front Door, a reference to both ADB’s logo color and the size of the bank relative to those trying to cross its threshold with an innovative idea.
The team sifted through 150 companies to nd the ones that not only had a promising innovation but were also commercially viable and well-managed enough to t ADB’s necessarily stringent procurement requirements.
“We picked 20, sent them to conferences, helped them to get more information, learned about them to see if we could pilot with them,” says Peters.
Now they have a solutions drawer, and they can introduce the solutions to potential partners in ADB. For example, a solar thermal storage technology provider from Taipei, China has been referred to
a project in Pakistan that the company was unaware of, and also to a desalination project that had not even considered using such technology before then.
“The innovation was not in the technology or even in the business case,” says Peters. “It was in giving them the awareness and information that empowered them to do work with us. All
innovative climate change technologies need money and access to markets and people. We’re a development bank, we have all of those. We’ve just got to nd ways to deploy them well.”
Access the ADB Technology register form here.
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