Background
BSH Hausgeräte GmbH is a global leader in the home appliance industry and the leading home appliance manufacturer in Europe, represented in about 50 countries.
The company’s brand portfolio includes eleven well-known appliance brands like Bosch, Siemens, Gaggenau and Neff as well as the ecosystem brand Home Connect and service brands like Kitchen Stories.
The product portfolio ranges from large home appliances – such as cooktops, ovens, extractor hoods, dishwashers, washers, dryers, fridges, and freezers – to small home appliances, such as vacuum cleaners, espresso machines as well as small kitchen appliances.
BSH is a Bosch Group company.
Challenge
BSH aspires to continuously improve quality of life at home and make people smile. For that, taking care of our environment is an important precondition.
We are looking for innovative ideas on how home appliances, related digital offerings, services and business models could encourage and enable the following pro-environmental user behaviors:
- Encourage Plant Based Nutrition: when it comes to food, meat and dairy products have the highest environmental impact. Consequently, encouraging eating less animal derivatives would have a positive environmental impact.
- Inspire Resource Efficient Cooking and Cleaning Behavior: the way how people cook and clean and how they use home appliances has a significant impact on the amount of resources they use. Inspiring efficient routines will help to save resources like energy, water, detergent, etc..
- Avoiding Food Waste: roughly one third of food produced is actually not eaten. A big part of it is thrown away in private homes. Reducing food waste here, will help to avoid unnecessary environmental effects.
- Minimizing Usage Of Single Use Food & Beverage Plastic Packaging: 70% of domestic plastic waste originates from food and beverage packaging. Avoiding or reusing plastic will help to keep our environment clean.
- Maximize Plastic and Organic Waste Recycling: people's household waste consists of large amount of plastic and organic waste. Collecting and recycling them separately helps to reduce their environmental impact.
BSH is seeking ideas at any stage of development. Solutions should be for the environment of private households and possible to commercialize by BSH in a Business-to-consumer (B2C) model.
What's in it for you?
A successful collaboration could mean forming a partnership/joint venture to co-develop and co-launch the idea to market.
This is a global challenge and BSH is willing to collaborate with individuals/freelancers and other industry participants/universities.
Please describe your approach detailled enough so that we can assess if we should start further discussions. However, please keep the protection of your work results and your efforts in mind. Therefore, please don’t provide confidential information at this stage.
Especially, please first file a patent application in your name before you provide us with any information, which you believe to comprise an invention. Only proceed if you are fine with that. Everything we receive at this stage, we will consider to be non-confidential.
If we see potential for a further collaboration, we will approach you and enter into a confidentiality agreement with you so that your information is protected in the course of the further disucssions.
Please be aware that we might have had the same idea as you and are already working on a similar approach.