Laurence Collingwood of Cilo wins UK Young Innovators Award

2022 Ingenuity Champion Laurence Collingwood, co-Founder of Cilo, has been awarded a Young Innovators Award, an annual competition from Innovate UK that supports and celebrates young entrepreneurs with groundbreaking business ideas.

Laurence, alongside business partner Ryan Brown, have been developing their Cilo app to help people reduce their climate impact. The carbon footprint-tracking app allows you to see the carbon cost of the products you buy and offers personalised reduction tips.

We caught up with Laurence to find out more about the Award, and how he and Ryan had been getting on in the six months since Ingenuity 2022.

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Congratulations on winning the Innovate UK Young Innovators Award! How does it feel to gain this recognition, and how will the award help Cilo?

Thanks! It’s an honour to win this award alongside some other incredible innovations, and it adds to our motivation to keep helping people and businesses reduce their impact on climate change. The validation it provides gives us huge strength as a business and we can’t wait to see what 2023 holds.

How has everything gone with the app in the six months since taking part in Ingenuity? How have your experiences on the Programme helped progress the business?

It’s been a really exciting time for us. Since the competition finished we’ve pivoted towards a B2B model, providing the app to businesses as an employee perk in order to gamify sustainability in the workplace and help companies build a culture of climate awareness from the ground up. We have our first trial with a major global insurance firm beginning in March, which we can’t wait to get started on.

The Ingenuity Programme was absolutely crucial in getting us to where we are now. The finances we received from winning the competition allowed us to keep working full-time on Cilo, the network provided has opened doors that might otherwise not have been open to us, but the most important thing was the confidence it gave us that we were on the right track.

And shout-out to Rachel Bedrock in the Ingenuity Lab too, for helping us with our application to the Young Innovator’s award!

It’s been a really exciting time for us. The Ingenuity Programme was absolutely crucial in getting us to where we are now.

Laurence Collingwood, Cilo

And finally – have you got any advice for this year’s Ingenuity cohort?

Make use of the opportunities the Programme provides. It’s a great community to be part of with some really valuable resources. I’ve found the monthly surgeries with business experts from an array of fields particularly useful.And don’t forget to smell the roses! There’s some really tough times as an entrepreneur, but it’s also a real privilege to be working on something you’re truly passionate about, and it’s important to take a step back every so often and appreciate that.

Find out more about the Cilo app at cilo.uk

Ingenuity Champion wins UK Young Innovators Award