Bengaluru, February  2022.

In an international social innovation partnership, Social Alpha and echo network have come together to catalyse India’s green transformation. The collaboration will focus on creating sustainable solutions in three key areas - One Health, Regenerative Agriculture, and Ecosystems Valuation – impacting people and the planet.  

The echo network is an over 1000-member community spanning 22 countries, initiated by the Principal Scientific Adviser to the Government of India in 2019 to enable organizations and individuals to interact and generate a shared purpose through collaborative science-based activities and research. Its multi-disciplinary approach involves government, industrial, academic, and private sectors. The key supporters of echo network include the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Hindustan Unilever Limited, RoundGlass, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), the Biodiversity Collaborative, and the Novo Nordisk Foundation.  

Through echo network, Social Alpha will have access to sustainability experts across the world who can work with Social Alpha and its portfolio start-ups. Similarly, the echo network will be able to tap into Social Alpha’s deep innovation ecosystem to collaborate and co-create solutions with its governmental, community, and industrial members.  

Social Alpha is committed to ensuring India’s green transition through a wide range of activities in the areas of climate action such as clean energy, agricultural innovation, health solutions, and capacity-building. Social Alpha considers social innovation and collective action to be of critical importance to India’s sustainability. Thus, the organization sees hosting the echo network as an integral part of their larger mission.  

Commenting on the partnership, Manoj Kumar, Founder and CEO of Social Alpha, said: “Science and Technology innovations are incredibly essential to drive our transition to a Net Zero carbon world. Start-ups are going to be the backbone of this transition as they catalyse and propel innovations from labs to markets and communities. Joining echo network helps Social Alpha further strengthen its charter to promote innovations for social and environmental impact by converging the interests and priorities of researchers, entrepreneurs and communities.” 

The Global Director of echo network, Prof. Shannon Olsson, notes: “The echo network is a unique concept to change how science is embedded in society both in India and, we hope, the world. We have established a fine-meshed network that allows the sharing of knowledge and purpose between scientists, key decision makers, on-ground community organizations, private companies, and the public. We are proud and privileged to be hosted by such a wonderful organization as Social Alpha and look forward to learning from them as we proceed to build our international community”.   

As part of the collaboration with echo network, The Danish Academy of Technical Sciences will host echo network’s international hub. This work will initially focus on engaging Danish universities and researchers in specific collaborative projects between India and Denmark, and at the same time raise funds to expand the collaboration and involve exchanges between, for example, the Nordic countries, Europe and the USA.  

“The echo network was initiated to ensure two things: firstly, that research contributes positively to India's green transformation, and that concrete projects in the countryside and in the cities are driven by the best and latest knowledge in the field. Secondly, that Indian knowledge and competencies within sustainability broadly understood and specifically within regenerative agriculture, one health and ecosystems must be linked to the strongest and best knowledge environments internationally. These are the tasks that we must help echo network to succeed in.” says Academy Director Lia Leffland.   

From the Innovation Centre in India, Innovation Attaché Jakob Williams Ørberg also welcomes the collaboration: “At the Innovation Center, we see ATV’s collaboration with echo network as an important opportunity to establish personal and deep relationships between the research and technology environments in Denmark and India, which will form the basis for new strong research initiatives in the coming years.”