Six months of innovation at Enel Innovation Hub
Favouring new uses for energy and new ways of managing it and making it available to increasingly more people in a sustainable way calls for faster innovation in the field of energy.
Companies like Enel which have made digitalization and open innovation the pillars of its industrial strategy have huge opportunities to seize in a rapidly changing world. This is the direction taken with the successful experience of the Innovation Hub that Enel inaugurated in July in Tel Aviv, Israel, where innovative technologies that can ensure the sustainability of the business are being researched and developed.
The Israeli high-tech start-up scene is among the most vibrant in the world and can boast such a concentration of innovative companies that it has been likened to Silicon Valley in the United States and called Silicon Wadi which means ‘valley’ in Hebrew.
Fishing in a sea of ideas
Just six months from its birth, the start-up accelerator opened in Tel Aviv has already achieved extraordinary results. Since July, under the leadership of Eran Levy, the manager of Tel Aviv Innovation Hub, the technological priorities on which to focus the scouting activities to find the best start-ups have been set in cooperation with the Group's business lines.
Three sectors have been chosen, including the industrial Internet of Things for the design of neuronal systems that are able to connect machines, sensors and devices of all kinds and to allow smart maintenance models that can optimise processes and cut operating costs. Another sector is smart home technologies, i.e., platforms, sensors and devices connected for the purpose of energy saving, cutting household consumption and delivering services and products within the framework of home automation and security.
The third key sector on which Enel has focussed is cyber security. It is crucial in preventing, protecting, detecting, monitoring and countering cyber threats to critical infrastructure such as power plants, power grids and company communication networks.
Last fall, the Innovation Hub held two boot camps, one in November on Cyber Security and other in December on drone technologies, to find the best solutions in these areas. Both occasions saw the participation of more than 35 start-ups. Meetings were also held with another six start-ups engaged in the smart home, industrial IoT and predictive analytics fields.
Working at the Hub for security
Aperio System is the first Israeli start-up to have won the Enel Cyber Security Hackathon and settle at the hub in Tel Aviv which is hosted by SOSA, the innovation platform that is collaborating with our open innovation project.
The technologies developed by Aperio in the field of cyber security have been designed to ensure the utmost protection of critical infrastructure. Energy infrastructure, in particular, uses a huge number of monitoring and data acquisition systems for the automation and control of machinery and equipment, thus creating an enormous “attack surface" for cyber pirates and attackers.
The ultimate goal of the collaboration is to give young Aperio engineers the opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Enel's needs in order to provide customised protection solutions developed for our infrastructure and to achieve the highest levels of protection and security.