In any groundbreaking endeavor, there comes a point where abstraction must make way for urgency, when the proof of concept must turn into a task too pressing to postpone. This came true for Daniela Kandel, Founder and CEO of Evergreen Innovation Platform (EIP), when she had to confront an issue whose gravity she could neither refute nor ignore. If she did nothing, then who would?
It turned out that no one would, so she took matters into her hands.
Today, she heads an organization that enjoys a unique role in the world of innovation in agriculture, impact investment, and entrepreneurship on a global scale. EIP works together with entrepreneurs developing innovations addressing actual problems encountered by smallholder farmers throughout the process, from validation and adaptation to commercialization and scale. It is not a financier; it is not a consultant. According to its founder, it is a long-term partner committed to finding out whether the proposed solution really works in practice.
This very specificity of mission is what sets her apart as a leader and defines EIP’s history.
When a Success Story Becomes a Mandate
EIP did not begin with a business plan or a pitch deck. It grew out of a collaboration between three organizations that had each been operating at the frontier of their respective fields: the Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, Startup Nation Central, and the Milken Innovation Center. Each brought something distinct – farmer insight, innovation ecosystem expertise, and financial modeling for development impact. Together, they piloted technologies in India, tested assumptions against field realities, and watched what happened.
What happened exceeded every expectation. One of the technologies they piloted proved its value to Indian farmers and went on to generate millions in revenue. The Indian market became one of the company’s largest. A replicable pathway had been unlocked, a model for international and local innovations to reach and scale commercially in smallholder markets and that changed everything about the conversation.
As a collaboration between nonprofit organizations, none of whom held this work as a core institutional mandate, the initiative was always structurally vulnerable. Its success made that vulnerability more acute, not less. Something durable needed to be built.
The initiative’s structural vulnerability meant everything they had proven could be lost. However, the strong support from the former CEO of Syngenta Foundation India (SFI), alongside the leadership teams at SFI, Agri Entrepreneur Growth Foundation, Syngenta Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture and Milken Innovation Centre, provided the foundation and confidence needed to formalise this work. Knowing these deeply rooted relationships in India were secure, Kandel made the decision to spin the initiative off into a stand -alone entity.
“If I did not found Evergreen Innovation Platform myself, no one would. Everything we had proven would be lost- like so many successful programs before it,” she says.
That recognition, that walking away was not a neutral act, but a decision to allow something valuable to disappear is the bedrock of EIP’s founding story. Kandel became co-founder alongside two NGOs, and the platform moved from possibility into permanence. It was, by her own account, an accidental career built on a chain of purposeful decisions: a series of opportunities, each one drawing her closer to work she believed in, until the work itself demanded she build something new.
An Academic Foundation Built for Impact
Before the platform, before Startup Nation Central, before the G8 presentations and the global ecosystem work, there was the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a rigorous academic foundation that would quietly underpin everything that followed.
Kandel holds a B.A. in economics and statistics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she graduated with honors, and an M.A. in financial economics, also from Hebrew University. The combination is quantitative rigor, statistical thinking, and financial theory that gave her the tools to evaluate what was actually working in development and impact work, not merely what looked good in a grant report.
That grounding in evidence and economics has never left her. It surfaces in the way EIP structures its feedback loops with farmers, in the way it measures whether solutions actually deliver value, and in its insistence that commercial viability is not a compromise of the mission it is proof that the mission is real.
Following her academic training, she worked as a Milken Institute Fellow at the Israeli Ministry of Finance’s Accountant General’s Department, focusing on financial innovation, social entrepreneurship, and impact investing and was directly involved in developing Israel’s first social impact bond for the prevention of Type 2 Diabetes. It was a formative experience: a young economist, still close to her graduate work, watching first-of-its-kind financial instruments take shape and reach the G8 stage. The lesson she drew was durable: you do not need all the answers before you begin. Expertise follows conviction.
Leadership Forged on the Mat and in the Field
Kandel does not trace her leadership philosophy back to a management textbook or a business school lecture. She traces it to taekwondo.
She competed from a young age, and the discipline shaped her understanding of leadership in ways she still draws on today. The dynamic of taekwondo, simultaneously a team endeavour and an intensely individual one, maps, she argues, almost perfectly onto the demands of building and leading an organization.
“Taekwondo is both a team sport and an individual one,” she reflects. “You cannot train alone you train each other, which means your growth depends on your partners and the culture your coach creates. But when competition comes, you are on the mat alone. Your team is behind you, but they cannot fight for you.” Between rounds, a competitor has thirty seconds with their coach time to think, to recalibrate, to reset. Then they return to the mat and handle it alone. The coach steps in only when real danger arrives.
That is how Kandel sees her role at EIP. As Co-founder & CEO, she sets the vision, defines the goals, and creates an environment where individuals and teams are empowered to take ownership of their responsibilities. Much like a coach, she provides guidance, perspective, and support when needed, enabling the team to perform at its best. Everyone owns their responsibility. The organization succeeds together.
Nine years at Startup Nation Central followed the Ministry of Finance fellowship, where Kandel rose to Senior Director, leading the organization’s ecosystem-to-ecosystem work and developing bridges between innovation ecosystems around the globe by leveraging Israel’s unique assets and capabilities. She joined when the organization employed seven people and stayed as it grew past 120. During that tenure, she spearheaded the Global Finder Network and Impact Bridges, initiatives that increased the positive impact of Israeli technologies and knowledge on social and environmental challenges globally. Across innovation ecosystems in dozens of countries, she learned what transfers between contexts and what does not, and she developed a conviction that the best innovation is always a two-way conversation. That conviction now sits at the core of EIP’s operating model.
Defining Leadership Excellence in an Accelerating World
Kandel holds a clear and considered view of what leadership excellence requires in the current environment and she begins not with strategy, but with intellectual honesty.
“We live in a world where change is not only constant, it is accelerating. Leadership excellence begins with the willingness to be continuously proven wrong. I will never be the smartest person in the room. But as long as I keep asking the right questions and create the conditions for my team to do the same, we stay in front together,” she states.
Excellence also requires focus, and Kandel is direct about what that means in EIP’s context. In the landscape where the platform operates, almost anything else is easier and more financially rewarding than serving smallholder farmers. The commercial incentives consistently point elsewhere. Kandel’s role, as she defines it, is to keep the organization anchored in its founding rationale especially on the days when that rationale is most difficult to defend.
She also addresses what she regards as one of the defining risks of the current technological moment: the temptation to outsource thinking to AI and other tools. Tools, she insists, should sharpen judgment, not replace it. Leaders and teams that abdicate thinking to automation lose the very quality that makes leadership valuable in the first place.
Her leadership style is, at its core, human-centered. She carries a fundamental belief that people are capable of far more than the roles assigned to them and that creating the conditions for someone to grow into who they want to become is the most powerful investment a leader can make.
The Platform: How EIP Works and Why It Works
Kandel’s core thesis is that true innovation is not simply about new technology it is about aligning business models with positive social and environmental outcomes. EIP operationalizes that thesis through a model that challenges the standard assumptions of both development work and commercial entrepreneurship.
EIP identifies entrepreneurs solving genuine, observed challenges that smallholder farmers face. When the platform brings a company into its portfolio, it does not assume the posture of a funder with a grant cycle or an advisor with a limited engagement window. It becomes a long-term partner bringing farmer feedback directly to partner companies in a productive, actionable form; helping them adapt where the field reveals gaps; and supporting them through failure as well as success.
Where solutions demonstrate genuine value, EIP helps entrepreneurs build their business case, refine go-to-market approaches, strengthen their evidence base, and connect to the partnerships and capital they need to scale. The endgame is always the same: companies that are not only impactful but commercially viable. Impact without viability does not last. Markets do.
Collaboration is the architecture of everything EIP does. The platform has built strategic partnerships with stakeholders who hold the trust of farmers, the trust of innovators, and access to capital and policy. All implementation work is currently in India, a market EIP knows with precision, but its partnerships also extend internationally, to innovators from the US, UK, and Israel, and to funders and partners across Europe and the US. That global perspective enables the platform to identify what transfers across contexts and strengthen what already exists in the Indian market rather than displacing it.
The AlchemistX Innovators Inside Podcast, which featured Kandel in early 2025, captures the essence of her approach: how aligning core values with business strategy, leveraging blended finance, and nurturing strong local partnerships can transform agriculture and empower rural communities. These are not abstract principles at EIP, they are operational disciplines, tested against field realities and refined through every partnership the platform manages.
Building the Culture: Where Ideas Are Welcome, Blame Is Not
Inside EIP, the culture Kandel builds reflects the same philosophy she brings to strategy. She has constructed an environment where ideas are genuinely welcome and where bad preparation or execution not bad ideas earns a consequence. The organization debriefs constantly on what worked, what did not, and why. It does not place blame. It gets better together.
“I ask the team to set goals that exceed what they are confident they can achieve. That is intentional- it shows them I believe they are capable of more, and it creates room to move from good to great rather than just delivering what is expected,” she emphasizes.
She also maintains a conviction that limited resources drive creativity. EIP cannot spread itself across every interesting idea, so it must be thoughtful and intentional about where it explores and why. That discipline, combined with a genuine commitment to individual growth, produces innovation from an accountable place- driven not by credit, but by the desire to create real value.
On the qualities she considers non-negotiable in leaders building innovative and sustainable organizations, Kandel is precise.
First: intellectual honesty paired with courage – the courage to admit error, to decide on incomplete information, and to adapt without losing direction.
Second: the resilience to hear no, make mistakes, and continue.
Third: the understanding that innovation can arrive from anywhere, including the youngest person in the room, and that structured space for every voice is one of the most consequential things a leader can build.
Fourth: trust – earned slowly, broken quickly, and never quite repaired the same way.
And fifth: the discipline to encourage people to compete with themselves rather than with each other. Real growth, she argues, happens when everyone works to be a better version of who they are.
The Hardest Chapters: Challenges and What They Built
Kandel does not soften the account of EIP’s challenges. The difficulties have been constant, structural, and personal and the line between those categories has often blurred.
The earliest challenge was architectural: transitioning from an informal nonprofit collaboration to a contracted commercial entity with aligned incentives and clearly defined roles. Formalizing relationships built on goodwill ,without losing the trust that made those relationships functional – required, in her words, enormous care.
Fundraising has been an ongoing test. Blended finance and catalytic capital structures remain relatively niche within the broader funding landscape. Making the case for a long-term systemic approach – rather than standard models with shorter cycles and more conventional metrics demands conviction, patience, and the willingness to adapt the narrative without compromising the thesis.
Through all of it, Kandel has returned to a practice she considers as important as any strategic decision: radical transparency about the real picture. When she shares challenges openly with partners, funders, board members, and team, something consistent happens. People bring their best thinking to the table. “That collective intelligence is what has moved us forward every time,” she says. Transparency, she has found, does not weaken trust. It builds it.
To the Next Generation: Fight for Something Worth Fighting For
When Kandel addresses emerging leaders and entrepreneurs, she begins not with tactics but with an honest accounting of what the work demands. No one, she states plainly, is coming to take the steps you believe need to be taken. That is both the weight and the gift of the work.
“Choose something you are willing to fight for, not just believe in, but truly commit to for five, ten, or even fifteen years. The path will test you at every level, and it has to mean something deep enough to sustain that,” she asserts.
Her counsel is practical and relational. Choose who you do it with just as carefully as you choose what you do. The people on the journey matter more than any strategy or milestone. Align on values early. Understand what support and decision-making look like between you before the hard moments arrive.
And ask for help. Kandel is direct about how difficult this is for founders the unspoken pressure to hold the answers, to project certainty at all times. But asking for help when you are stuck, or when optimism runs low, is what allows a leader to sustain the work for the long term. That balance staying responsible and managing risk while remaining open enough to be lifted by the people around you is one of the hardest things about leadership, and not something any founder should carry alone.
The Vision Ahead: Proof at Scale, and a Template the World Can Learn From
Kandel’s vision for EIP’s future is as precise as her account of its origins. She intends to prove, at scale, that this model works in a genuinely self-sustaining way not propped up by a single grant or program, but built as durable infrastructure that transforms the innovation ecosystem for smallholder farmers in India and continues long after any of the individuals currently involved.
“We are working to change hundreds of millions of lives- not through charity, but through real markets, viable business models, and innovation that earns its place because it delivers genuine value,” she states.
That distinction earned value versus offered support is fundamental to how Kandel thinks about what lasting change actually requires. Once EIP establishes that proof of concept in India, the vision extends outward: to Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and every market where large communities of smallholder farmers remain disconnected from innovations that could transform their livelihoods. The Indian model becomes a template the world can learn from.
Innovative finance and innovative models are what will drive the next phase of global development and EIP is building one of those models today. Kandel is proud that it is happening in India, and more proud that the intention is to make it replicable far beyond.
The platform that could have disappeared that would have disappeared, had she walked away continues to grow. A career that began, as she describes it, as a series of lucky coincidences has arrived at something deliberate, durable, and consequential. The question she could not dismiss turned out to be exactly the right one to ask. And the answer she gave has already begun to change lives.