The Sustainable Brands Innovation Open (SBIO) is celebrating its 5th birthday with a new crop of highly innovative, socially and environmentally conscious entrepreneurs. SBIO presented by Target, would like your help in choosing the runner-up and winner of the People’s Choice Award on June 5th via a live online public vote.
Since its inception, SBIO has aimed to identify startups with the most potential to make scalable and sustainable impacts. Past SBIO alumni have continued to flourish, including 2012 finalist Mosaic and 2011’s winner, One World Futbol.
Mosaic, a crowdfunding solar investment platform, allows the public to invest as little as $25 in solar projects, and estimates that the average person will see a return of 4.5 percent. According to Mosaic, over $1 million has been invested thus far and they are preparing to launch an additional $100 million in projects on their website.
One World Futbol also continues to do its part to save soccer in the developing world by partnering with 138 organizations, such as the Joyce Banda Foundation and Chevrolet, to distribute its indestructible soccer balls to youth in approximately 137 countries.
The goal of SBIO is to continue inducting these mission-driven businesses into the SB community, where they can benefit the most from its influence. In fact, in order to ensure community involvement from the beginning, we placed our top 40 entrants up for a public vote from April 8-14th — with over 900 votes, our online community chose PrintEco as their favorite, automatically enrolling them as a semi-finalist in this year’s SBIO.
Along with our other semi-finalists, PrintEco will pitch their ideas to our judging panel at the Sustainable Brands 2013 conference in San Diego on June 5th. Our 10 semi-finalists will then be reduced to four, who will then pitch to the full main audience, which will be streamed live via our website on June 5th, from 4:45–5:30pm PST, giving the online community another opportunity to participate. A live online vote will determine the runner-up, who will also be the SB People’s Choice Award. Our judges will determine the winner.
While we couldn’t do this without our expert judges, we also appreciate the help of the SB community in highlighting the new wave of talent working hard to solve the world’s biggest problems. Celebrate our 5th birthday with us by voting for your favorite venture. Check out this year’s group of semi-finalists; each week we will publish an article on each semi-finalist leading up to the public online vote on June 5th.
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Published Apr 23, 2013 4pm EDT / 1pm PDT / 9pm BST / 10pm CEST