Flexing entrepreneurial muscles to fight climate change: MScSM Team wins ICUBE Sustainable Innovation Challenge
For Jordan Chang, Ira Jain, Jake Sajko, Valeria Widjaja and Marcus Uhthoff, sustainability means finding innovative, outside-the-box solutions to real-world challenges. Together, the team won first place in ICUBE’s annual Sustainable Innovation Challenge.
The group was truly collaborative from the beginning, as Chang, Jain, Sajko, and Widjaja from IMI’s Master of Science in Sustainability Management (MScSM) program teamed up with Uhthoff, a fellow colleague in the Master of Science in Applied Computing program at U of T.
ICUBE’s Challenge, once again in partnership this year with Sobeys, offered hands-on experience for students in solving complicated, real-world problems and finding solutions that have meaningful impact for communities. “These challenges are more than just competitions,” says Ignacio Mongrell, Assistant Director of ICUBE. “They are opportunities for students to create meaningful impact.”
Sobeys, a major Canadian retailer in the grocery space, put forward a challenge on electrifying their fleet for their distribution channels. Given that a solution isn’t as simple as replacing gas vehicles with electric vehicles, this challenge wasn’t only an environmental impact issue. Chang notes there are multiple challenges at play, such as “engaging Sobey’s customers and employees to care about electrification, and understanding the steps [they] wanted to take in improving their environmental impact.” Beyond that, Chang says, “the climate crisis impacts human wellbeing, and every good sustainability solution understands how to mitigate that.”
The team recognized that electrification is a significant challenge, and that there is significant room for positive impact. Further, each member of the team was keen to take electrification and delve deeper into its impact within grocery retail space. Sajko says, “having worked at the grocery retailer for many years as a cashier…. [this] piqued my interest.” Widjaja echoes the idea of exploration. “I saw this as an opportunity to… learn more about one aspect of the industry,” she says, and “dive into the deep end of electrification.”
Giving students like Sajko an opportunity to bring past experience forward into a sustainability challenge in this sector from a different angle is one of the reasons ICUBE creates such opportunities in the first place. “We hope they leave with a deeper understanding of the intersection between business, technology, and sustainability,” says Mongrell, “and the confidence to drive innovation in their future careers.”
The team credits their interdisciplinary approach, diverse skill & knowledge backgrounds, clear narrative, direct linkages to Sobeys sustainability commitments, and their team relationships as key ingredients in their success. “Our strengths,” says Sajko, “were that we each came with our own subject expertise that supported specific parts of the project. Some of us had backgrounds as consultants in digital adoption and change management, while others had strong skill sets in data analysis and marketing strategy development. It was exciting to leverage our previous professional experiences to add value to the project.”
Most importantly, when asked about the best piece of the Challenge, the team cites their learning above all else. “Making the finals and winning was fun,” says Widjaja, “but I learned a lot about the grocery retailer industry, [electric vehicles], and electrification challenges…which was valuable in itself.” Her sentiment is matched by Chang: “I’m incredibly grateful for the confidence and knowledge this challenge has given us,” she says.
