Innovation at South Pole

By Marco Hirsbrunner, Chief Operating Officer

South Pole’s purpose is true climate impact for all, and scaling up new climate action ideas is key to this. This is why the Innovation team was established early last year, with Wouter Crul and Patrick Bürgi leading the team.

Let’s just recap on some of the success stories: 

Technical carbon removals: The Innovation team led the efforts to develop the NextGen CDR Purchase Facility, which was announced at the World Economic Forum in May 2022. The facility aims to purchase over one million certified carbon removal credits by 2025. NextGen is a big milestone for us and cemented South Pole’s position as a pioneer and market leader in technical carbon removals.

Hydrogen for Next Zero Initiative: In close collaboration with the Climate Investments team, the Innovation team led the early stages of the Hydrogen for Net Zero Initiative, which aims to leverage environmental markets to improve the business case for green hydrogen.

Regrow Ag partnership: The recent completion of the South Pole partnership with Regrow Ag is a fantastic example of a success story by the Innovation team. Regrow is the most adopted agricultural MRV provider globally and a leader in scientific and technological innovation for monitoring measurement. The partnership brings scientific independence to carbon project development.

Salesforce marketplace: The Salesforce Net Zero Marketplace is a really exciting project and example of digital innovation across companies. The tech team has been working hard to support this launch with the current development of a new version of the Compensate API. Additionally, a new web shop is also being developed that will be more technically sound than the current one. All this hard work behind the scenes will make the launch of the Salesforce marketplace smoother and more efficient.

While we have a lot of good success stories to share, after careful review by senior management and input from external consultants, it is now clear that the innovation structure is not the most effective setup going forward. The business lines have undergone significant growth and have now matured to a stage where they need to have their own innovation capacity.

So whilst innovation remains central to South Pole’s mission, it will no longer be focused within a separate corporate service innovation team but rather integrated across the company. The various teams will move into the business lines they have been working for, with the exception of the software development teams, which will move into our technology team. The most notable moves are the fundraising team, which will now be part of Climate Investments, and the Research team and the Inno lab, which will now be part of the Climate Projects business line.

Please rest assured: although South Pole will now innovate in a different place on the org chart, the aims and roles of our former innovation penguins will stay broadly the same. Their talent is critical to South Pole’s long term success and by bringing them closer together to the business lines, we are looking forward to releasing even more creative energy with even more business impact.