Sustainability partnerships
Innovate with us
Collaborative Innovation program
We use our collaborative innovation program to explore opportunities to innovate with external partners to accelerate more sustainable solutions for the paints and coatings industry. Our innovation challenges were initially only focused on startups, but quickly expanded to include suppliers and other value chain partners.
We paint the future and make a sustainable impact together with trusted collaborative partners by developing a shared approach, thinking creatively and following up with the next necessary steps to accelerate go to market.
Find out how to innovate with us below or click the buttons to learn more about the collaborative innovation program and see our previous challenges.
Let’s collaborate
We're looking for startups, scale-ups, suppliers, customers and researchers with innovative solutions and eagerness to further develop with AkzoNobel.
We are especially interested in innovations that could push us one step closer to achieving our 2030 sustainability ambitions.
Connect with us and explore opportunities to work together.
Innovation areas
We are looking for creative solutions in the following areas:
Productivity
We’re looking for solutions to more efficiently manufacture and deliver paint to our customers and help them improve their paint application process by making it more effective and efficient.
Asset protection
Our customers rely heavily on paint to protect surfaces and products. The expectations are high when it comes to longevity, chemical resistance and the need for predictive maintenance cycles.
Surface enhancement
Paint brings colors and effects to life. We want to bring our customers new ways of extracting more value from surfaces and products by adding new functionalities and/or making them responsive.
Environmental protection
We want to make a significant and long-lasting difference to preserve our planet beyond generations to come by stimulating a circular economy and offering our customers competitive and more sustainable solutions.
Carbon reduction
We’ve set science-based sustainability targets to reduce carbon emissions across our value chain by 50% (baseline 2018). Achieving this relies heavily on our collaboration with value chain partners.
Benefits of collaborating with AkzoNobel
- Year-round access to experts and top industry leaders
- Get your innovations to market faster
- Receive a tailored collaboration agreement
Meet us
Our collaborative innovation program
We launched our collaborative innovation program in 2019. This is a bold initiative to accelerate and scale more sustainable solutions for the paints and coatings industry.
Previous challenges
No great thing was ever created alone. We run a variety of programs to accelerate innovation in a win-win mode and bring new solutions to our customers.
