Insurance, safety, environment: test your business creativity with Edition 141 of our weekly quiz!

Lateral Sparks, the weekly quiz from YourStory, tests your domain knowledge, business acumen, and lateral thinking skills (see the previous edition here). In this 141st edition of the quiz, we present issues tackled by real-life entrepreneurs in their startup journeys.

What would you do if you were in their shoes? At the end of the quiz, you will find out what the entrepreneurs and innovators themselves actually did. Would you do things differently?

Check out YourStory’s Book Review section as well, with takeaways from over 355 titles on creativity and entrepreneurship, and our weekend PhotoSparks section on creativity in the arts.

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Q1: Flower power

Many festivals and places of religious worship generate vast amounts of flower waste. Much of this is dumped in local water bodies, leading to pollution. What’s a sustainable – and even profitable – way to tackle this challenge?

Q2: Climate tech

Tackling pollution is a major challenge, and can lead to health issues as well as major disasters. How can technology help here, particularly in building scalable solutions?

Q3: Tech and safety

The rise of hate speech poses grave challenges to those from communities perceived as non-mainstream. Such discrimination and targeting occur across platforms and languages. How can tech help tackle this problem?

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Q4: Insurance innovation

Lack of insurance in smaller towns and villages can cause crippling problems to families. How can technology help provide such insurance products and services, while also generating employment?

Q5: Speech therapy

Teletherapy services can be a useful solution to provide therapy services to patients in remote areas, or where there are stigmas attached. How can such platforms be extended to more under-served communities?

Answers!

Congratulations on having come this far! But there’s more to come – answers to these five questions (below), as well as links to articles with more details on the entrepreneurs’ solutions. Happy reading, happy learning – and happy creating!

A1: Flower power

Rupa Trivedi is the founder of Adiv Pure Nature, which makes natural, handmade dyes from discarded flowers. These dyes are used in sustainable, artisanal textiles, apparel, and lifestyle products, for brands like Anthropologie, Eileen Fisher, Globus Switzerland, and Amba.

She has signed agreements with Mumbai’s Siddhi Vinayak temple and Haji Ali Dargah to get their discarded flowers.

Read more here about how she collects around 1,000-2,000 kg of rose, marigold, hibiscus, and coconut husks every week for her products.

A2: Climate tech

Akanksha Priyadarshini founded the company Aurassure to use data to help answer the ‘what if’ questions in disaster management. It helps mitigate pollution through an IoT-enabled intelligent system for monitoring environmental gasses, dust and weather parameters.

Aurassure generated a revenue of Rs 1 crore in its first year, and Rs 5.4 crore in its second year.

Read more here about the company’s deployments in over 150 cities in India, and its plans to expand operations to Brazil and Southeast Asia.

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A3: Tech and safety

Aindriya Baru, a queer, adivasi engineer has built a next-gen solution to tackle homophobic trolls. She developed ShhorAI as an AI-powered bot to combat hate speech on social media, and identify trolls in regional languages as well.

The algorithm can scan, identify, and categorise hate speech in text, and detect code-mixed typing.

Read more here about how Barua is currently reaching out to social media platforms to integrate the technology into their community safety systems.

A4: Insurance innovation

Ankit Agrawal launched InsuranceDekho as a platform to provide opportunities and access to insurance for a broader range of society. The goal is to ensure that every village in India has an insurance agent, thus empowering individuals and families with financial protection.

It targets a three-pronged problem in India: distribution, digitisation and diversification.

Read more here about how it trains and empowers individuals to become insurance agents, and has raised $200+ million in funding.

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A5: Speech therapy

Elizabeth Jean Thomas, an audio and speech-language pathologist, launched Phonologix as an assistive technology platform. It provides access to quality speech therapy services to children and adults.

“There were no speech therapy centres in many smaller towns, and I used to get calls from parents asking for tips on how to help their children with special needs communicate,” the therapist recalls.

Read more here about how the team of 14 has launched its innovative e-learning platform, Speech Ally, that empowers parents to become co-therapists.

YourStory has also published the pocketbook ‘Proverbs and Quotes for Entrepreneurs: A World of Inspiration for Startups’ as a creative and motivational guide for innovators (downloadable as apps here: Apple, Android).