Empowering innovation through the spirit of exploration : The Solar Impulse Foundation celebrates the third edition of the Pioneers Forum

Brussels, Belgium – October 8, 2025 — The Solar Impulse Foundation returns to the iconic Maison de la Poste in Brussels for the third edition of its flagship event, the Pioneers Forum. Bringing together hundreds of changemakers from across its ecosystem, the event offers a unique platform to accelerate the deployment of efficient climate solutions. By connecting business leaders, policymakers, and innovators, the Forum fosters collaboration, inspires climate action, and celebrates concrete progress toward a more sustainable future.

CONNECT & INSPIRE : Matchmaking leaders who turn sustainability into a reality 

Bringing together over 300 participants from business, policy, finance, and research, the Forum creates a unique space to connect, exchange ideas, and build partnerships. With its emphasis on real-time matchmaking, it fosters collaborations and kick-starts concrete projects that deliver large-scale impact.

One of the program’s highlights will be Climate Impulse: Innovation born from Exploration — a dialogue between SIF’s Chairman and Initiator, Bertrand Piccard and Vincent Colegrave, Head of AI Strategy & Transformation, Syensqo. This interactive session will immerse the audience in the Climate Impulse project, showing how exploration fuels innovation and pushes the boundaries of what is possible.

CELEBRATE: From ambition to implementation: Spotlighting scalable solutions.

Championing pioneers who turn ideas into actions, the Solar Impulse Foundation will showcase ten   pre-selected adopter-innovator collaborations. Each adopter, whether a company, city or institution, will co-present with its innovation partner a concrete and successful implementation case study: the environmental objectives they set, the solution they deployed, the impact achieved and the potential for replication.

To further celebrate these pioneers, the Foundation will reveal the five Pioneer Awards winners. Each winning collaboration - composed of a client adopter and its solution provider - embodies the pioneering spirit of advancing ecological sustainability while delivering measurable results. Winners were selected across five key sectors: Agrifood & Natural Environment, Building & Construction, Industrial Processes & Consumer Goods, Mobility, and Utilities (Water, Energy, Waste). 

By spotlighting successful, replicable case studies, the awards affirm the scalability and global relevance of clean technologies that deliver measurable impact and are ready to be adopted worldwide.

“We want to congratulate and award the companies who are using the Efficient Solutions labeled by the Solar Impulse Foundation. They are demonstrating how ecology can be profitable and industry can be cleaner. They are true pioneers of an attractive way to protect the environment.  Let's make a celebration bringing together all the innovators, the pioneers, the actors of a cleaner and more efficient world. That will also make human energy more powerful!” , said Bertrand Piccard, Chairman and Founder of the Solar Impulse Foundation.

Discover the list of finalists by category:

Agrifood and Natural Environment:

• Indicium Dynamics implements Robotics Cats (Hong Kong) -  a machine vision startup specialising in AI-powered wildfire detection and environmental monitoring.

• PepsiCo implements CCm Technologies (United Kingdom) - the technology converts captured CO2 and other waste streams (such as Ammonia and Phosphate) into a sustainable fertiliser in a net-zero process and provides many health benefits to the soil when applied to land.

Building and Construction :

• Ciec by ENGIE for Paris Habitat implements Enerdrape (Switzerland) - a modular, prefabricated, and scalable geothermal panel technology that allows turning any new or existing underground infrastructure into a renewable source for the heating and cooling of buildings.

• Coop implements Danfoss solution in collaboration with ANEO retail and BASE Foundation (Denmark) - an innovative business model that enables end-users to access clean and efficient cooling solutions without the need of an upfront investment. This servitization model addresses the key market barriers that hinder the adoption of sustainable cooling by allowing customers to pay for the service consumed, on a fixed-fee-per-unit basis.

Industrial Processes and Consumer Goods :

• Aalborg Forsyning - Norbis Park implements Kyoto Group (Norway) -  A thermal energy storage system which stores energy in the form of heat in a molten salt solution. By allowing energy to be stored in the salt medium, Heatcube can be charged when electricity is the least expensive. This is called load shifting and promotes the use of abundant and affordable renewable energy for clean and stable process heat. 

• EDF implements MyTroc Pro (France) - a platform which facilitates the circular management of material resources by enabling users to donate, lend, exchange, or sell unused items, either internally or between partner organisations.

Mobility:

• Louis Dreyfus Armateurs (LDA) implements Bound4blue (Spain) - an innovative Wind-Assisted Propulsion System (WAPS) that uses active boundary layer control through suction to harness wind energy, providing a sustainable and cost-effective alternative to traditional propulsion.

• Swapfiets implements Nowos (Netherlands) - a solution that gives lithium-ion batteries a second life by expertly repairing, reusing, and tracking them instead of replacing them. This approach reduces waste, conserves raw materials like lithium, and supports a circular economy.

Utilities (Water, Energy and Waste) :

• The city of Mykolaiv implements Boreal Light GmbH  (Germany) - A solar water desalination system for off-grid communities capable of delivering high quality hygiene drinking, irrigation, fish farm and sanitation water from any kind of high saline and polluted water resources. The main characteristics of this solution is that it is powered fully by solar, the simplicity of its design and its affordability. 

• Heineken Spain implements Solatom CSP SL (Spain) - a solution that produces renewable energy heat by concentrating solar energy with mirrors that track the sun. This energy is concentrated into a receiver - an isolated vacuum tube absorber - where steam, hot oil or hot air is produced.

Meet the five winners HERE.