A Tartu consultancy works in the awkward space between invention and adoption. Its tools include European funding proposals, municipal pilots and an unusually candid account of what accelerators need to get right.
From olive-oil marketing in Balochistan to startup grants and a women-led enterprise summit, Social Innovation Academy is working on the unglamorous parts of social change: skills, customers and connections.
The Lagos-born innovation company has spent years assembling the people, capital and institutional connections behind African tech ventures. Its most useful lesson: a promising app still needs somewhere to go.
CleanFiber makes high-performance, carbon-negative cellulose building insulation from recycled corrugated cardboard. Using a proprietary wet separation and liquid borate infusion process, it produces a cleaner, lower-dust insulation that performs better than legacy newsprint-based cellulose. Based in Buffalo, New York, the company has scaled rapidly since opening commercial production in 2020 and was named the #1 fastest-growing manufacturing company in America on the 2024 Inc. 5000.