Challenges for Creative Minds

Got a good idea? Your eco-friendly brainstorm or media scheme might be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars

by Bruno Giussani

If you have an idea for an innovative, executable consumer product or service that can "contribute to an eco-friendly lifestyle" or a plan for the smart use of media in communities, then get ready to jot it down, draft blueprints, and fill out the submission form: Your idea could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Three new initiatives challenge creative minds everywhere to come up with innovative ideas and designs related to sustainability and to digital media. Part of a growing trend of competitions seeking solutions for pressing problems, all three combine two powerful concepts: the social-change catalyzing award (à la TED Prize) and the competition-fuels-innovation contest (à la Ansari X-Prize).

Help Consumers Reduce Global Warming

The Picnic Green Challenge, the first of the three, is an eco-contest organized by Picnic, an annual conference and idea festival that takes place in Amsterdam this year from Sept. 23 to Sept. 29. The best ideas (one or several, depending on the quality of the entries) will win up to €500,000 ($670,000) in funding, plus free consulting and help opening doors that could bring the project to fruition.

The winning projects should be executable; the submissions (which must be received by Aug. 30) will include a concrete plan to bring the idea to market. In addition, organizers are looking for well-designed products and services that can "enable large numbers of people to effortlessly reduce their personal impact on global warming."

The winners will be selected by a jury chaired by Virgin Group founder Richard Branson, who has launched several environmental initiatives recently, including devoting part of the profits of Virgin Atlantic Airways to research on greener fuels. Other jurors are representatives of both big business (Unilever and Tommy Hilfiger) and environmental organizations (Greenpeace and the Climate Group) as well as designers and tech investors. (Disclosure: I've been asked to join the jury.)

Apply Fuller's Trimtab Principle

The Buckminster Fuller Institute, the Brooklyn (N.Y.)-based organization named for the visionary American inventor, has issued a broader challenge. The BFI seeks an idea with "significant potential to solve humanity's most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth's ecological integrity." Ideally, write the organizers, the entries should demonstrate Fuller's "trimtab principle", which posits that "small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change."

BFI Challenge entries (which are due Oct. 30) can relate to any field, from art to industry—it remains to be seen if such a wide and vaguely described target will yield significant results (the most successful innovation competition to date, the X-Prize, has worked because of its very precise guidelines). The winner will receive $100,000 "to be used to take the winning strategy to the next stage of development". The judges have not yet been announced.

Reinvent Digital Media

Last week the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami issued its second News Challenge, an initiative that will award a total of $5 million to a range of innovative proposals for using digital technologies to "inform and inspire communities" and "improve the lives of people where they live and work."