From challenge prizes to an electric truck, a seawater-powered lamp, and countless other bold innovations, the sixth annual awards honour the products, concepts, companies, policies, and designs that are driving change, tackling issues from climate change to inequality, and so much more.
LONDON, May 3, 2022 /PRNewswire-PRWeb/ -- The winners of Fast Company's 2022 World Changing Ideas Awards were announced today, honouring clean technology, innovative corporate initiatives, brave new designs for cities and buildings, and other creative works that are supporting the growth of positive social innovation, tackling social inequality, climate change, and public health crises. The UK's Nesta Challenges secured an honourable mention in the Established Excellence: 5-14 Years In Business category
Nesta Challenges was founded in 2012 to establish British expertise in challenge prizes and deliver social good through open innovation. Since then, it has designed and delivered 44 challenge prizes, engaged 12,000 innovator teams and awarded more than £80m in prizes and seed funding.
A challenge works by promoting open innovation. They judge entrants on the quality of their idea, not their track record. They do not specify how to solve a problem, meaning multiple approaches can be considered and developed. This levels the playing field for innovators and entrepreneurs who are too often overlooked by traditional grant funding.
Notable prizes include the £8m Longitude Prize tackling antibiotic resistance, the £6.5m Open Up Challenges that helped catapult the UK to the top of global fintech and the £1m Mobility Unlimited Prize to revolutionise wheelchair design.
Nesta Challenges Founder and Managing Director, Tris Dyson, said: "10 years ago we began as an experiment to rediscover how challenge prizes could be used to drive step-changes in innovation for social good. In the decade since, we've honed how a challenge works, we've grown to become a self-sustaining business and have distributed more than £80 million to innovators to solve some of the biggest challenges we face in society – from scaling solutions to ocean plastic pollution and improving access for vulnerable people to the legal system, to reimagining wheelchair design for 21st century users and incentivising the next generation of rapid diagnostics to tackle superbugs. It's a great honour to be recognised by Fast Company's World Changing Ideas Awards."
Now in its sixth year, the World Changing Ideas Awards showcase 39 winners, 350 finalists, and more than 600 honourable mentions—with climate, social justice, and AI and data among the most popular categories. A panel of eminent Fast Company editors and reporters selected winners and finalists from a pool of more than 2,997 entries across transportation, education, food, politics, technology, health, social justice, and more. In addition, several new categories have been added this year including climate, nature, water, and workplace. The 2022 awards feature entries from across the globe, from Switzerland to Hong Kong to Australia.
Fast Company's Summer 2022 issue (on newsstands May 10, 2022) will showcase some of the world's most inventive entrepreneurs and companies tackling global challenges. The issues highlight, among others, probiotics for coral reefs, easy-to-assemble kit homes for refugees or disaster survivors, a 3D printed vaccine patch, an electric truck, a system to heat homes from the waste heat of a name-brand factory, and prosecutor-initiated resentencing for overly long prison sentences.
"We are consistently inspired by the novelty and creativity that people are applying to solve some of our society's most pressing problems, from shelter to the climate crisis. Fast Company relishes its role in amplifying important, innovative work to address big challenges," says David Lidsky, interim editor-in-chief of Fast Company. "Our journalists have identified some of the most ingenious initiatives to launch since the start of 2021, which we hope will both have a meaningful impact and lead others to join in being part of the solution."
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For media enquiries about Nesta Challenges, please contact Andrew McKay and Emma Harvey at [email protected] or +44 (0)20 7754 3610
About the World Changing Ideas Awards: World Changing Ideas is one of Fast Company's major annual awards programs and is focused on social good, seeking to elevate finished products and brave concepts that make the world better. A panel of judges from across sectors choose winners, finalists, and honourable mentions based on feasibility and the potential for impact. With the goals of awarding ingenuity and fostering innovation, Fast Company draws attention to ideas with great potential and helps them expand their reach to inspire more people to start working on solving the problems that affect us all.
About Nesta and Nesta Challenges: Nesta is an innovation foundation. For us, innovation means turning bold ideas into reality and changing lives for the better. We use our expertise, skills and funding in areas where there are big challenges facing society. We've spent over 20 years working out the best ways to make change happen through research and experimenting, and we've applied that to our work in innovation policy, health, education, government innovation and the creative economy and arts.
Within Nesta, Nesta Challenges exists to design and run challenge prizes that help solve pressing problems that lack solutions. A challenge works by shining a spotlight where it matters and incentivising people to solve these issues. We are independent supporters of change to help communities thrive and inspire the best placed, most diverse groups of people around the world to take action.
We support the boldest and bravest ideas to become real, and seed long term change to advance society and build a better future for everyone. We are part of the innovation foundation, Nesta.
We are challengers. We are innovators. We are game changers.
Media Contact
Andrew McKay and Emma Harvey, Seven Consultancy, +44 7976635366, [email protected]
SOURCE Nesta Challenges
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