“The change starts with me”

We’ve shared on these pages many posts demonstrating Dassault Systèmes’ commitment to creating a more sustainable world; at the bottom of this post you’ll find links to a few of these stories. We take pride in knowing that our solutions are helping 3DS customers across the world in diverse industries solve the greatest challenges facing our planet. But we know that our own people also have great ideas on how to help protect our planet. So back in May, we launched LEAP for SUSTAINABILBILITY@3DS, our first internal innovation challenge. The idea: tap into the creative and innovative minds of our employees to accelerate the power of 3DS solutions to enable sustainable change.

This initiative stems from our Sustainability Compass that we announced earlier this year, which outlines our strategic goals between now and 2025. Among our commitments is running an annual event dedicated to sustainability and innovation. Enter LEAP, as a means for generating innovative solutions by tapping into the collective intelligence and diverse range of personal and professional backgrounds of 3DS employees around the world while also contributing to our company’s sustainability goals.

We were thrilled that more than 100 passionate employees volunteered their time to “leap” into this six-month contest! Ultimately, 40 ideas made it into the funnel, and 7 teams moved into the solution building phase. The teams and their ideas include:

• The CASD team: provide farmers with a virtual universe to create environment-friendly circular agriculture practices
• The DRAGONFLY team: develop a mature framework for dismantling assets at a large scale to recycle raw materials and limit use of natural resources
• The ECOLUTION team: redesign manufacturing, packaging, material and recycling processes to reduce plastic waste, divert packaging to recycling plants and reduce carbon output
• The SEEED team: rethink electronic product development and distribution from a circular economy perspective, to significantly reduce e-waste through new design practices
• The SLaM! team: improve sustainable land management through operational performance, monitoring and tracking to minimize and mitigate environmental effects
• The UPCYCLERS team: digitalize the battery upcycling chain from collection to second life to reduce the cost of upcycling, optimize waste management and make the industry profitable
• The WASTE MINERS team: convert today’s mineral waste into tomorrow’s resources to rehabilitate used land in a sustainable way and make the mineral separation processes more sustainable

Congratulations to UPCYCLERS! As the winning team, they will receive dedicated support to integrate their solution into the 3DEXPERIENCE portfolio, and ultimately market it to our customers in the battery supply chain.

At the contest’s conclusions, we asked some of the participants why they chose to participate; you’ll find some of their inspirational reasons in the following video. One gentleman said he looked at his daughters and knew he needed to take action to protect their future. Another shared his ‘aha’ moment: if he wants to see change, it must start with him.

We thank all our our participants; we were were so impressed by their innovative ideas and enthusiasm!

Read more about Dassault Systèmes sustainability initiatives:

• Science-based targets for a science-based company
• How can we kick sustainable innovation into gear?