Research & Development of Sustainability Networking Platform for Businesses

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Greener is an online networking platform that enables businesses to find innovative and applicable sustainable solutions fit for their needs. By utilising our team of experts, Greener is building an AI-driven algorithm which is able to intricately understand user requirements and automatically connect them with appropriate partners.Initially conceived to protect businesses in the looming climate crisis, Greener is being deployed to facilitate a green-recovery following the devastation of COVID-19 on the UK economy.This platform works for both sustainability Providers (firms providing sustainable products/services) and Seekers (firms searching for sustainable products/services), as our AI-driven technology streamlines the searching process exponentially. Instead of trying to network and search for the right partners manually, Seekers are immediately given a list of suggested Providers, and Providers have their products automatically shown to a wide range of ideal customers.This centralisation of Seekers and Providers offers a deep understanding of market trends, needs and future direction. This enables Greener users to not only find sustainable innovation within their sectors but also utilise cross-sector innovations for relevant solutions. Greener empowers its users to form meaningful, effective and long-term sustainable collaborations through a deeper understanding of their needs as well as market offerings.By mediating and dramatically simplifying this transaction, Greener will help drive the growth of the zero-carbon economy across the country. The Greener platform also emphasises intuitive, human-centred UX (user experience), as many businesses consider sustainability to be complicated and tough to understand (86% of firms interviewed during market research agreed). We believe that sustainability is paramount in establishing resilient and innovative supply chains, and seek to democratise its accessibility.The key benefits of this platform are:1. Allowing Seekers to find sustainability solutions fit for their requirements and thus reducing their environmental impact through collaboration with Providers.2. Providing a larger market to (often small) sustainability Providers and empowering them in volatile markets.3. Reducing and streamlining market complexities and therefore helping Seekers and Providers to save money, time and resources while building resilient, sustainable ecosystems.4. Enabling users to promote their Greener collaborations as a marketing tool to communicate their environmental efforts with their consumers to drive more sales. This is particularly impactful as it is projected that a "€966 billion opportunity exists for brands that make their sustainability credentials clear" (Unilever, 2017).We have already deployed an alpha platform to gain users, test our hypotheses, and gather feedback for future functionality. This platform uses off-the-shelf software. Our next step is to develop a full software platform ourselves which allows us to implement more of the advanced functionality which our users desire.The Greener platform will begin to implement additional features as our user base grows. Currently, the feature pipeline consists of marketing and cross-promotion capability, integrated sustainability analytics tools, ecosystem connection functionality, and user sustainability scoring (i.e. the Greener Score). Our vision is to offer a platform which enables users to understand, implement, and improve their sustainability performance in an intuitive and powerful way, while simultaneously growing the zero-carbon economy worldwide.