Tech Talks: Circular Technology

Mr. Jackson Yip is the CEO & Co-Founder of EC Innovation Limited, dedicated to entrepreneurship after graduating from HKUST Business School in 2023. With the support of chemistry professionals, Jackson is leading the commercialization of a breakthrough electrocatalytic technology into EC Innovation’s flagship product, “EC Flow System”, which converts agricultural wastewater into nutrient solution. With the vision of creating a perpetual planting ecosystem around the globe, Jackson is engaging with government, private institutions, NGOs, and farm owners to accomplish this aspiration in various agricultural sites.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

Better water conservation
The construction of Circular Economy

Natasha is an experienced business leader with a passion for sustainability. She has held leadership positions at JLL and KPMG for the last decade, primarily in change management space, driving business critical transformation at a regional and global scale. Throughout her career, she has been deeply committed to sustainability and have led various initiatives to embed sustainable practices in her work place as well as communities. As the co-chair of the Eco Club at JLL Hong Kong, she spearheaded numerous programs to reduce the firm’s environmental impact in HK and engaging employees in sustainability efforts.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

My ambition is for Hong Kong to transform into a city where reusable alternatives become the standard, reducing single-use waste and promoting a more sustainable future. For 2024-25, below are my key goals:
1) Enabling targetted partnerships with property developers & corporations to help replace single-use cups and food boxes with reuseable alternatives.
2) Working with partner cafes to promote reusables more actively.
3) Partnering with environmental organisations to reach a wider audience for Muuse.

Sharon Ng is a recent graduate of BSc in Biological Science and MSc in Environmental Science and Management from HKUST. She founded Sootable with the mission of teaching humans how to live peacefully with nature. She is a Science-lover and is eager to apply scientific principles to drive innovations in Sootable. For starters, she took on the project to tackle severe air pollution and accelerate the transition to renewable energy simultaneously. Through waste-to-X transformations as a mid-term goal, she hopes that Sootable can upcycle unwanted materials into something beneficial to the environment, which is the definition of X.

Sootable defines itself as a Nature-inclined, GreenTech and ClimateTech company. Sharon and her team are working hard to implement nature-compatible solutions to restore Earth’s splendid scenery.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

– The roadmap to a healthy world which I aspire to make it happen is Sustainability, Redundancy, Abundance and lower cost for the right things.
– A tighter Circular Economy loop
– Lead humans, by humans, with love (love is contagious and therefore sustainable!)
– A cleaner Supply Chain

A highly experienced practitioner, consultant and facilitator Marisa blends management and leadership of strategic design and innovation. Her work across disciplines is broad – supporting organisations to understand, apply and leverage frameworks and methodologies to optimise value creation; from consulting to co-creating, with Fortune 500’s, national ministries, non/not-just-for-profits and SMEs.

In 2009 Marisa discovered her nascent entrepreneur and embarked on her first sustainability-led business model venture, shifting the negative perception of plant-based eating; enabling reduced-carbon diets and responsible consumption – supporting organic farmers, through a (then) pioneering circularity, systems-thinking based business.

After a move to Singapore, in 2016, the nexus of her old life and new was conceived – The Inceptery (B Corp certified in 2021); an innovation firm working at the edge of conventional boundaries and assumptions, challenging notions of success in our current paradigm – focusing on systemic value creation.

Recently the emphasis has also shifted to include supporting teams to become more self-sufficient – to embed and embody the knowledge, understanding, capabilities and mindsets needed to build a culture of democratic, inclusive and responsible innovation towards systemic change – for people, planet, prosperity as a strategic imperative.

In their work they take each opportunity to scale broad and deep, building the capacity of the ecosystem by creating the conditions for others to be empowered to take action, through our collective consultancy and tech enabled decision-making support.

A graduate in Strategic Design Management, and with a firm belief in the non-linear nature of systems change, that encompasses the many facets of sustainability – wherever opportunity arises, she harbours a fascination with the limitless power of intentionality, giving a voice to underrepresented users, and externalising creative processes collectively – bringing about new consciousness, solutions, and businesses alongside technology to improve human-planetary conditions.

My Sustainability Goals for 2024:

1. Regionally, not just HKG, for organisations or all sizes and types to start their sustainability performance measurement and improvement through reporting and disclosures in any form they can. Just getting started using the variety of tools, platforms and technology that exist already, which should help them in getting started on this journey.

2. We are looking for larger scale organisations for a pilot who want to explore building new or shifting old business models to think about the business model of the future that incorporates sustainability-led imperative, using tools and methodologies that incorporate systemic value creation as a primary driver.

3. From HKG and the region, build a synergistic network of partners, collaborators and clients focused on holistic approaches towards systemic value creation and systems innovation. (Either they have solutions or the desire/need and want to bring build a collective do this through partnering and collaboration).