NESTA was in Birmingham today to entice us into innovating. The Big Green Challenge is a two year climate change project with a £1 million pound prize at the end. Any community group (or similar) can win if they find a communal and repeatable way to cut CO2 emissions by 60%. Easy then!

There were queries/criticism at the launch (which you’ll hear in the podcast), some on the blog post of the media partner for the prize and also here.

I approve of ideas with ambitious targets. Too often public life offers mediocrity born of easy targets.

As one Brummie told us (if anyone remembers who please tell me) at today’s regional launch it may well work best if people collaborate on ideas. Indeed I was wondering of the prize fund could have been split to reward a winner and reward those who collaborate to innovate – something on the lines of that audacious open source bid for the Third Sector Innovation Exchange.

Listen to our podcast at the bottom of this post, watch Sarah Beeny’s video, read the website, subscribe to the blog and let us know if you apply.

By the way I heard interesting ideas from Jerome Baddley of Nottingham Energy Enterprise – so hello Jerome. The prize is also on partnership with Unltd. Birmingham was the first launch, more dates in other cities throughout November.

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 Nesta Big Green Challenge in Birmingham [7:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This entry was posted on Friday, November 2nd, 2007 at 9:24 pm and is filed under Grassroots Channel, Social Enterprise, Video, Voluntary Sector, leadership, nptech, Birmingham UK, Society, nptechuk, Youtube, upyerbrum. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.