It would have been easy to rush into technology implementation with Botanical Water, but that’s not the way Fujitsu works.
“We are not pure technology players,” explains Frederik De Breuck, Chief Digital Officer/CTO at Fujitsu Belgium and Head of the Enterprise Blockchain Solution Center at Fujitsu Global. “We understand that innovation is 80% solving a business problem and 20% delivering the technology to do it, and we’ve created an ecosystem to deliver this.”
The Fujitsu philosophy resonated with Botanical Water. “The reason we selected Fujitsu as a partner was because we loved that they weren’t just giving us tech for tech’s sake,” Paule praises. “It was tech for real-world solutions.”
Fujitsu believes the only way to drive truly sustainable business transformation is to establish an equal and trusted partnership with our customers.
So we worked with the Botanical Water team to understand their technology, their goals and their challenges.
We saw at once the massive potential of Botanical Water.
It could provide organizatons such as juice concentration facilities, sugar mills and alcohol distilleries with an opportunity to reduce their waste and introduce closed loop manufacturing processes. While food and beverage manufacturers and bottlers could use Botanical Water as a sustainable water source to reach their environmental, social and governance (ESG) targets.
It could tick all the commercial boxes for a start-up with growth potential, while also enabling companies to leave the world a better place through their business practices.
And there were multiple use cases for the water itself. It could be repurposed for industrial and ingredient use – think beverage companies using Botanical Water to avoid the withdrawal of ground and acquifer water from scarce regions. It could even be bottled and sold to consumers as a retail product – saving resources in a world where
14.35 billion gallons of bottled water are sold each year.
Additionally, it could serve a philanthropic purpose by enabling corporate organizations to gift safe and sustainable water to communities facing chronic shortages or limited/no access to safe water. Reinjecting or replenishing water scarce regions allows companies to offset their internal water use and aim to have a net positive water impact on their ecosystem.
But Botanical Water needed a means of securely trading reusable water. So, with a deep and immersive knowledge of the company, we then embarked on a human-centered co-creation program, together, with one goal: to deliver a sustainable water trading solution that works in the real environment from day one - and can evolve over the longer term.
The outcome: Botanical Water Exchange (BWX), a unique blockchain-based water trading platform.
“We thought about what we could use to make water trading frictionless and realized that the most disruptive technologies in recent years have been platforms like Airbnb and Uber, which connect supply and demand,” says Terry Paule. “With Fujitsu, we created a platform that could manage local manufacturing, quality certifications, produce reliable and dependable schedules, and participants could transact in a digital contract.”
