.jpg)
Powered by Shell, Onward—formerly Studio X—has rebranded itself and says its on a mission to transform the energy industry and achieve a net-zero future.
It has assembled an inaugural advisory board that will bolster the company’s growth with unique perspectives to advance the energy transition and scale services to the energy sector and to the global climate community.
The single-source platform focuses on innovation, collaboration, and energy entrepreneurialism in the energy sector and supports the acceleration of commercial success of scalable innovations that improve the energy system and tackle climate change.
Onward will help energy and climate tech companies leverage digital capabilities to innovate and to achieve net-zero goals, creating a community for energy entrepreneurialism, and advancing technology to strengthen the resiliency of existing energy resources for resource resiliency.
It operates by connecting thousands of innovators across the globe to tackle difficult energy and climate challenges.
Onward offers a climate tech startup accelerator programme, tackles moonshot energy projects through its in-house Innovation Lab, provides capital investment to fund new technologies, and orchestrates crowdsourced projects and challenges to facilitate collaborative breakthroughs within the global energy innovation industry.
Since 2020, Onward has invested more than $3.2 million in companies chosen to participate in the accelerator program.
“The new identity is inherent to the mission itself: To move Onward toward novel energy solutions and net-zero goals. We eagerly look forward to using our collaborative, innovation platform to achieve rapid, previously unattainable energy solutions for our clients,” says Jeff Allyn, Onward CEO.
“With the insight and expertise of our new advisory board, these solutions will only become more accessible, expeditious, and impactful. We warmly welcome each member to the Onward team.”
The five-member advisory board will work with Onward’s executive team to advise across strategy, research, and project execution, providing hands-on mentorship to the company’s startup accelerator members and climate challenge project participants.
The inaugural members include:
● Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE Foundation
● Eric Drummond, CEO and founder of Innovation Corridor.
● Nils Mellquist, angel investor, analyst, and strategic advisor focused on sustainable investing.
● Noel Kinder, Chief Sustainability Officer of Nike and an established ESG leader with over 20 years of experience.
● Tina Sharkey, lecturer at USC's Iovine and Young Academy
Founded in 2020, Onward has supplied the energy industry with new solutions, resources, and opportunities to approach energy challenges.
In the past year alone, Onward created a 3.5 times more efficient oil slick identification algorithm in one-eighth of the time it would have taken an independent customer to develop.
In three weeks, the company was able to analyse a complex well dataset that would have taken a lone employee at a traditional energy company 60 years to evaluate. --OGN
- by Abdulaziz Khattak