Open call for Maryland Innovation Lab

The Maryland Innovation Lab is leading the matchmaking and providing guidance along the way. Maryland Innovation Lab participants will gain exposure in the U.S. for their business, while receiving mentorship from the corporate partner they’re matched with.

Maryland Innovation Lab Entry Categories

• People & Workforce
  • Leveraging workforce insights: solutions that gather information and insights about the workforce to better understand employee engagement and how to maximize individual employee skill sets.
  • Improving employee experience: solutions that focus on upskilling, creating opportunities for work flexibility, enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, and bridging cultural and language barriers across different geographies.
  • Skilled labor: solutions that make finding skilled workers across the supply chain from farmers, drivers, operators to middle managers a breeze.
• Sustainability
  • Tracking carbon offset and commercializing carbon credits: The world of carbon commercialization is booming and the Maryland Innovation Lab wants to be a part of it. They are looking for solutions that can help them accurately track carbon across all parts of the agricultural supply chain and can be scaled across many regions with rigorous standardization. They are also looking for solutions that can enable the farmers to take a more active role in the carbon offset market.
  • Setting sustainability standards for agriculture: They’re looking for disruptive solutions and technologies that can help provide a standardized and consistent approach to sustainable, social, and agricultural practices that can be communicated and enforced across different regions and organizations in the supply chain.
  • Sustainability education: While setting standards and carbon offsetting are the main focus, they are keen to look at all innovative sustainable solutions. More specifically this might be, the cost-effective recycling of plastic, sustainable packaging materials, disruptive solutions that track and validate sustainability claims, or educate consumers on the importance of sustainability, or consumer insights on the adoption of sustainable practices.
• Retail and Product Optimization
  • Understanding and tracking consumer behavior: understand, track, and gather consumer behavior in both the B2B and B2C space to reduce the pain points in the customer journey.
  • Retail and product optimization: solutions that enhance the retail and product experience by innovating planograms, heat mapping, dynamic product pricing and promotion innovations, and assortment optimization.
  • Brand experience: solutions that enhance the brand story by leveraging consumer insights to understand key messaging, acquire customers efficiently and cost-effectively, and increase customer education.
• Optimizing Supply Chain & Distribution Processes
  • Optimizing supply chain & distribution processes: solutions that optimize the individual processes and streamline operations. This might include the automation of repetitive tasks, how they process orders and manage inventories, or ways of analyzing operational or production efficiencies in order to create improvements and maximize efficiency.
  • Shipping and transporting sustainably: solutions that make shipping and transportation eco-friendlier by increasing renewable energy, and creating efficient processes.
  • Transparency and traceability: solutions that use disruptive technology to reveal high-level improvement opportunities at each step of the agricultural supply chain to deliver end-to-end traceability across all aspects, from product origins to quality assurance.
• Wildcard
  • In the pursuit of sustainable practices, as stated in other categories, Maryland is also interested in solutions to address greenwashing within their operations. They are committed to transparent and authentic environmental efforts and welcome innovative strategies to ensure their commitment to sustainability is genuine and impactful.
  • The goal is to create a dynamic and resilient food ecosystem that benefits local communities, supports farmers, and aligns with modern consumer demands for sustainable, nutritious, and ethically sourced food products. If your solution can do that but doesn’t fall into one of the previous categories, apply here.

Criteria

• Bootcamp: Selected teams will be invited to a 2-3 day Bootcamp in Maryland to work with partners and mentors to refine their pitch, solve for unique problem areas, attend workshops, and co-create solutions.
• Program Live: A 10-week period of validation where L Marks guides collaboration between the corporate partners and the selected companies to create impactful use cases.
• Demo Day: Demo Day enables the companies to articulate learnings from the Lab and demonstrate the value they have proven. The showcase event presents the successes and learnings from the program.

For more information, visit World Trade Center Institute (WTCI).