Announcing The Winners Of The
2018 World Changing Ideas Awards
See the winners–picked from nearly 1,400 entries–of our awards: an
impressive list of 12 companies, initiatives, concepts, and projects that are
poised help shift society to a more sustainable and more equitable future.
We’re pleased to announce the winners of
the 2018 World Changing Ideas Awards. World Changing Ideas, now in its second
year, celebrates businesses, policies, and nonprofits that are poised help
shift society to a more sustainable and more equitable future.
Below, you can see the winners in 12 different
categories. Each category was judged by a jury of prominent social
entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, thinkers, and designers, plus a Fast
Company editor.
The winners were picked from a list of 240
finalists, which were chosen from a pool of nearly 1,400 total entries. All the
entries deeply impressed us with their creativity, boldness, and potential for
real impact–especially poignant in a year where any progress has seemed, at
times, impossible.
GENERAL EXCELLENCE
Empatico, Kind
Foundation
As a Mexican immigrant and the son of a
Holocaust survivor, KIND Healthy Snacks founder and CEO Daniel Lubetzky has
always considered diversity, inclusion, and empathy to be vitally important
character traits. His solution, which launched in October 2017, is a free
video-conferencing and digital learning platform, with interactive lesson plans
designed to connect students around the globe, to build empathy between different
people and different cultures.
The setup is basic: Teachers just need a
computer with a camera and internet connection. To goal is for educators in
different parts of the globe to log on, and complete the same activities at the
same time. There are group exercises designed around learning more about your
local weather or geography through some basic mapping, and how culture
influences the way people interact with their environments. Each group of
students can then connect with another classroom somewhere else, so that kids
learn from other kids firsthand about what’s the same or different.
ADVERTISING
The Humanium Metal Initiative, Great Works
What if every time the police confiscated
guns, those weapons were melted down and remade into something that benefited
the people and communities who had been hurt by gun violence? That’s the
premise of The Humanium Metal Initiative, a pro bono campaign from Stockholm
creative agencies Great Works and Akestam Holst, which devised a business
development strategy to brand the melted down guns as a new precious metal,
which could be sold to artists to use, with the proceeds
going organizations battling poverty and violence in the areas where the
weapons came from.
APPS
GreyMatters
GreyMatters is an iPad app that arranges
significant music, photos, and stories from throughout someone’s life in a
user-friendly storybook format. In the app, a family member can upload photos,
music, and memories specific to a loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s or
dementia, and also lets them access pre-loaded pop culture content from past
decades–like Duke Ellington music or Katharine Hepburn film clips–to situate
them in a familiar context. The goal is to help people with dementia
access memories, but it also provides caregivers with a way to structure their
interactions that alleviates some of the stress of not knowing what to do or
what to say in the moment.
CONSUMER PRODUCTS
HelpUsGreen,
Kanpur Flowercycling
Ankit Agarwal and Karan Rastogi collect
millions of tons of flowers left at temples and mosques, then turn the waste
into products like incense sticks, soaps, and eco-packaging. In the process,
they stop pesticide-infused roses and marigolds from polluting the dirty River
Ganges and provide jobs for lower-caste women who previously didn’t have
them. The founders saw that flowers left at religious sites are a unique
waste challenge. For sacred reasons, they can’t simply be thrown into
landfills, so they end up in the river. Instead, Agarwal and Rastogi looked for
second-uses that are respectful to the flowers’ original purpose, like incense
sticks that can be used for worship. And in the process, they create jobs for
lower-caste women.
DEVELOPING WORLD TECHNOLOGY
DigiFarm, Vodaphone
DigiFarm is a mobile agricultural platform
that is text-based and aimed at unsophisticated feature phones. It not only
contains valuable information on livestock farming, horticulture, and growing
crops. Farmers can also access micro-loans and discounted “inputs” like seeds
and fertilizer. That way, they can boost the yields of their properties, which
are typically only five acres or less. It was launched last March by Safaricom,
the phone network that pioneered the M-Pesa mobile money service. Within 45
days, 90,000 farmers had registered. Now there are more than 800,000 farmers on
the platform.
ENERGY
ET-One, Thor
Trucks
While you might picture 18-wheeler trucks
making cross-country trips, most of the heavy-duty truck market is far more
local. For truck drivers delivering local freight, or grocery distribution, or
for garbage trucks or cement trucks, a vehicle with a shorter range isn’t an
issue: That’s the market Thor Truck’s all-electric ET-One semi is trying to
meet. It can haul 80,000 pounds of cargo, and travels 300 miles on a
single charge. When the workday is over, it can charge in just 90 minutes.
FOOD
Joyn Bio,
Gingko Bioworks and Bayer
The biggest issue for industrial agriculture
is that growing the massive amounts of food we currently need also involves
using amounts of energy and creating massive amounts of pollution. Much of
those negative outputs come in the form of nitrogen-based synthetic
fertilizers, which are created by coverting nitrogen from the air into a
spreadable material through a process that’s inefficient and creates greenhouse
gases. Field run-off from heavy applications then contaminates waterways.
To fix that, Bayer Pharmaceuticals and Ginkgo
Bioworks, a biological engineering company, have joined forces on a $100
million joint venture to create a line of microbes will live in harmony with
some plants while producing nitrogen to feed their roots naturally. Some plants,
like soybeans, peas, and other legumes, do this already. The goal is to update
staple crops like corn, wheat, and rice to do it, as well.
HEALTH
Lia, Lia
Diagnostics
Lia is the world’s first flushable
pregnancy test. The device uses the same amount of material as six squares
of three-ply toilet paper and contains no glue. Its protein, plant, and
mineral-based fibers biodegrade whether flushed or composted, which means that
in addition to their environmental benefits, they offer a revolutionary new
measure of privacy. The device is thin enough to go into an envelope and can be
placed in a back pocket.
HEALTH
Chasing Coral, Exposure Labs
In one of the hypnotic opening scenes in
the documentary Chasing
Coral, a diver swims through a coral reef filled
with life: sea turtles, bright blue and yellow fish, and coral covered in
shades of pale yellow, olive green, and muted blues and browns. A little later,
the diver joins a researcher on a dive in Florida, where warming water has
caused mass bleaching. When they go underwater, all that is left to see are
coral skeletons. The movie shows, vividly, some of the early effects of
climate change. Extreme bleaching, which happens when corals overheat, once
occurred every 25 or 30 years. Now, these bleaching events happen every five or
six years, and because corals need about a decade to recover, they’re dying.
STUDENTS
Warm Wall,
Lauren E. Lee
Warm Wall is a heated, gently curved wall
mount that could be installed in public restrooms to give women on their
periods a place both to alleviate pain (warmth helps with cramps) and to build
community. Designer Lauren Lee envisions women gathering at the heated section
to commiserate over a shared experience and to start conversations around it to
counteract the societal silence around a very common thing that regularly
affects 50% of the population?
TRANSPORTATION
Alice Commuter, Eviation
In five years, if you want to take a trip
from San Francisco to San Diego, it may be possible to do it on a small
electric plane–and with a ticket that costs less than driving or taking the
train. The Israel-based startup Eviation, which is building a new all-electric, nine-seat
airplane, called the Alice Commuter expects to begin making its first
commercial flights in 2021 and scale up to hundreds of routes across the U.S.
over the next few years.
URBAN DESIGN
Los Angeles ADU Project, Los Angeles Innovation Team
As rents keep rising in Los Angeles–since
2011, the cost of an average one-bedroom has increased more than 60%–the city
has been pushing for a new solution: making it easier to build backyard homes.
In a backyard in the L.A. neighborhood of Highland Park, the city’s Innovation Team has spent the last two years working with one
family to understand in detail what it takes to build an “accessory dwelling
unit,” (ADU) and how that could change.
The team designed a sample house and a
process to help people build their house. It also worked to create a new
financing mechanism to help people get loans, and MayorEric Garcetti also
lobbied for a state bill that removed large fees to connect backyard homes to
utilities and also removed parking requirements in neighborhoods near public
transit. Interest in ADUs is now quickly growing: there were 120 permits issued
for the units in 2016, which skyrocketed to 2,342 in 2017. The plan is for
10,000 total units by 2021.
BY MORGAN CLENDANIEL
https://www.fastcompany.com/40532898/2018-world-changing-ideas-awards-winners
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