Over 1k youngsters gather in Mysuru to create sustainability solutions

Mysuru: Flemming Besenbacher, chairman of Unleash, the non-profit organisation that together with Infosys last week organised a sustainability innovation programme here involving 1,000 youngsters from 110 countries, says listening to the experiences of some of the participants has been mindblowing.
He says one is a young girl who used to live in a refugee camp in Syria.“She managed to get an education, went to the UK for a Master’s and PhD degrees, and she is now back with a solution for refugee camps that involves taking waste water and converting that into biofuel,” he says.

Another is a young person from Africa, who had never before stepped out of his small village, had never been in a plane. “He said this (the event) is an opportunity of a lifetime, this will change my life forever,” Flemming says.
Flemming, who is also professor of nanoscience at Aarhus University, Denmark, launched Unleash in 2016, and has since organised what is called the Global Innovation Lab four times – in Denmark, Singapore, China, and now India. He said he met Nandan Nilekani (Infosys chairman) in the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2020, and Nilekani invited him to hold the programme at the company’s 300-acre campus. The pandemic delayed the event by two years.
Unleash’s objective is to bring young people from around the world to come up with innovative solutions to the 17 UN sustainable development goals (SDGs). This year, the focus was on seven of them, including education, water and climate change. There were 19,000 applications, of which 1,000 were selected. There were an equal number of women and men.
The programme is structured, with teams of five being formed, and with the help of facilitators, the teams frame the problem, ideate, prototype, test, and implement.
“Although they are here for a week, I’m always impressed at how far they get,” Flemming says.
Nilekani says what he really likes about the programme is its empowering mix. “Young people – they are bright, enthusiastic, passionate, not cynical. You have gender diversity, economic diversity, you have different professions. You have people from around the world. It’s an immersive experience, and that’s a mind-expanding experience. And there’s a structured way of looking at problem solving,” he says.
The company’s Mysuru campus, he says, is a perfect place to hold it, given that the company has been at the cutting edge of sustainability. “We went carbon neutral in 2020, 30 years ahead of the Paris accord deadline. We have 57 million sqft of office space, all built to the latest standard of sustainability. We have 100% waste water recycling. We have biodiversity, some 300 odd birds in this campus, (a wide variety of) trees. All buildings are designed for low energy consumption. That youngsters are discussing sustainability in this environment, that is very powerful,” he says.
Indians have been major participants in all Unleash events. This time, around 400 were Indians, many of them from Infosys.
Flemming says there are now over 7,000 Unleash alumni, who often continue their friendships formed at the events, and help organise local hacks across regions. He says he hopes to find long-term partners who can help scale the programme.