Climate change is becoming more and more real as the world starts to experience some of its major threats. Because of this problem, innovative solutions are slowly surfacing as the world understands that change needs to happen today.
iGrow, based in Indonesia, has been attracting worldwide popularity in the social impact startup scene due to its innovative model that acts like a complete farming supply-chain. It basically offers a platform that connects unemployed farmer, landowners w/ unutilized lands and liquid investors, allowing them to work together, creating a more efficient farming industry. iGrow identifies crops w/ stable demand, prices and growing characteristics and then offer these to farmers to grow. It then provides farmers with tools such as a cloud-based software to assist in management especially in monitoring progress. It is an attractive and creative business because it addresses unutilized resources while addressing food scarcity, which is an impact of climate change due to changing weather conditions.
But despite IGrow’s success, the enterprise is still subject to future worsening threats of climate change that are listed below.
- Resources
Climate change in severe weather and ocean level increase will likely to result in disappearance of land by the sea, this will reduce the land and soil resource iGrow can use in their business model. This will mean for iGrow to scout and acquire new land, which increases their cost and thus creates a hardship for iGrow to be successful.
Climate change, such as severe weather, natural disasters will worsen living environment for human beings, heat stress, physical damage, contaminating and spreading disease will increase mortality rate. This impact does not spread evenly across all social sectors, the ones in the button of the human society pyramid (e.g. farmers) will be more impacted than other sectors. This means that the labor group size will shrink faster than the customer group size, which creates a shortage of labor for iGrow business model.
- Market
Again, due to irregular climate changes, severe weather, and natural disasters, there is likely to be a shortage of drinking water and food. This is positive aspect for iGrow, because this means more market demand for iGrow, and great growing opportunity for the business.
- Operation model
Due to the above volatile climate changes, it will be harder to predict demand and supply of agricultural product, this will creates challenges for iGrow’s day to day operation, e.g. supply chain planning, distribution channel set up, pricing strategy and staffing strategy etc.
- Harder to manage risk
It is a popular belief that climate change is resulting in more natural disasters that ever. Big tsunami or earthquake could destroy Indonesia totally as 2004 with minutes. iGrow will be out of business should these type of events happen.
Despite promising growth opportunities, the future of IGrow is still quite uncertain given the numerous future threats it might encounter. One probable solution that might guarantee the company’s future is synergy through partnerships. Given its small size, it would be ideal for IGrow to seek alliances from larger international companies that can help it operate in scale. Bayer AG would be a perfect fit for iGrow. Bayer already puts a lot of time and investments in the agricultural space and its goals are well aligned with iGrow. Bayer can offer its research and services to iGrow to support its business. Bayer can also share high breeding techniques for farmers to grow better yielding and better quality crops. Another expertise that the company can offer to IGrow are land development and advance technologies in monitoring to increase operational farming efficiencies. The synergy will address farming in nations with extreme weather conditions, contributing again to better yields. Another company that compliments IGrow is Unilever which has been very vocal in expressing its sustainability goals. Unilever can commit to the purchasing side of the crops given its consumption industry, addressing volatility in demand. Unilever can also provide its network and distribution channels which is vital for IGrow once it expands internationally.
To conclude, IGrow is one of the exciting innovations that seek to address negative impacts of climate change today. Given its size as a startup and its foothold in agriculture, the company still faces a lot of future risks. Partnership is one of the many possible solutions to address such risks and secure the faith of the business. IGrow as a social enterprise represents an initiative. Hopefully more and more social businesses will be inspired with IGrow and will create unique unthinkable solutions that will change the world for the better.
Sources:
https://www.techinasia.com/igrow-startup-arena-jakarta-2014-startup-asia-jakarta
https://www.bayer.com/en/societal-needs-and-our-solutions.aspx
https://www.igrow.asia/home/how_it_works
https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/SYR_AR5_FINAL_full.pdf