In December 2019, Orange announced its new “Engage 2025” strategic plan. This ambitious plan aims to change the way we run our company and deliver our services and it sets out two priorities: reduce our carbon footprint and accelerate digital inclusion.
In terms of digital inclusion, we’ll be tackling the digital divide, knowing that up to 20% of people in Europe need help using essential digital services. We will also cut our CO2 emissions by 30% compared to 2015.
Our ambitious goals are an opportunity to collaborate with start-ups so we can improve our business practices.
The portfolio of potential solutions in this field may be extremely wide so please note the following use cases for this challenge.

These are the priority areas that are focusing our collaboration with innovative start-ups:

Recycling, Repair and Repackaging of smartphones: Orange wants to increase the number of reconditioned phones in its portfolio, but they aren’t always available. Only a small percentage of smartphones are recycled, depending on the country. How can we motivate smartphone owners (B2C and B2B) to bring their old phones back for recycling?

Digital Sobriety: energy sobriety is already a goal for many people. We want to integrate similar behaviours and best practices. Our networks are now able to adapt their energy consumption to the real-time needs of customers and IOT devices. This requires reducing unnecessary communications to a minimum. We’re looking at ways to encourage our customers to adopt more eco-friendly digital practices (B2C) and technical solutions that optimise IOT communications to reduce unnecessary activity on our network (B2B).

Sustainable energy: thousands of our antennas are mounted on radio towers. How can we make these towers more sustainable and integrate renewable power production units (over and above the solar panels we already use)? Sustainable energy requires storage: we already employ lead-acid batteries but are looking for more sustainable solutions that use less rare-earth oxides. We’re also interested in the topic of battery management software to optimise the lifetime value of sustainable power production units.

Orange charging stations: Orange’s next goal is to upgrade its vehicle fleet, including cars, vans and service trucks, to thousands of electric vehicles in the coming years. To achieve this, we'll need a large network of EV charging stations located near our offices, data centres and radio towers. We’re looking for cost savings solutions including a third-party business model to reduce operating costs.

CO2 monitoring: we are interested in a service or mobile app to collect CO2 data and assess the impact of employee (and soon customer) travel and urban transport in compliance with GDPR requirements. We want to inform people of the CO2 impact of going from A to B when choosing a transport solution.

Selection Criteria

We are only looking for Growth&Scale and Mature projects;

We will take into account the proposed solution’s cost savings and viable business model, ease of integration into our infrastructure or services (integrated solutions are better), and potential compliance with new 5G network capabilities.