Sustainability Maker

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

BACKGROUND

Some 30% of the world's population consumes approximately 70% of total resources and thus accounts for the majority of environmental problems worldwide. In Europe, the major negative environmental impacts from consumption occur in three areas: (1) housing and household energy consumption; (2) mobility and tourism; and (3) food and agriculture. The European Union has established policies and strategies towards sustainability and eco-efficiency. These can also be adopted by other nations and be viewed as more sustainable role models for other countries and regions. There are also promising sustainable technologies available, but their implementation does not match rapid population growth, i.e., by 2050, the worldwide population is expected to reach nine billion. Many stakeholders are already contributing to solving problems such as climate change, diminishing biodiversity, water and food scarcity, poverty, health issues and social crises. However, they face many hurdles, notably a lack of power and knowledge, coordination and funding.

OBJECTIVES

The 'Sustainability Maker' project proposes to use the enabling opportunities of new media and other innovative ‘bottom up’ strategies to resolve urgent sustainability problems and to implement European environmental and social policy. Its overall goal is to create an online platform and network, the ‘Sustainability Maker’, whose aim will be to become a powerful initiative towards the resolution of sustainability-related problems. Offering a collaborative approach to finding creative solutions, the ‘open innovation’ platform combines a website and a mobile application, to be supported by annual conventions (physical meetings). The project will bring together people who have identified sustainability-related problems with those who are to develop, or who have already developed, solutions. In addition, the project will help to devise funding solutions for such initiatives.

Other project goals include:

Helping implement EU environmental and social policy and strategies more widely and more quickly, thereby helping to solve sustainability-related problems;

Harnessing more effectively the creativity and innovation potential of many different businesses, organisations, experts and actors;

Reducing the time to market and costs of innovation for sustainability;

Enabling SMEs in particular, as well as other smaller organisations to participate in open innovation and people-sourcing activities;

Establishing new funding mechanisms and new business models, socio-entrepreneurs, community-supported businesses, social innovation and collaborative ventures;

Experimenting with different models regarding trust and transparency, motivation and rewards, distribution of intellectual property rights etc., in an open innovation platform as a means of finding the best way to guarantee high level involvement and satisfaction of all stakeholders; and

Preparing the full-scale implementation of the open innovation platform after successful completion of the project.

Expected results:

A ‘Sustainability Maker’ platform prototype (Beta Version 2) consisting of a website including open innovation, people-sourcing, voting and funding opportunities and offering sustainable solutions as main features;

A ‘Sustainability Maker’ mobile phone application prototype (Beta Version 2);

A ‘Sustainability Maker’ network, initially of over 58 000 actors (including universities, professors and students) in the EU Member States of Italy, Poland, Hungary, Denmark and Germany;

A minimum of eight ‘Sustainability Maker’ challenges – formulated in collaboration with companies, NGOs, governmental organisations, communities, municipalities, educational institutions, research establishments, consumers and others; and

An innovative ‘Sustainability Maker’ financing instrument.