OpenIDEO - OpenIDEO Team Notes - Congratulating Sony + Open Planet Ideas

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Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.

May 31st 2011
Congratulating Sony + Open Planet Ideas

We're sending a big shout-out to our friends over at Sony for winning the Communicating Sustainability category at the Guardian Sustainable Business Awards! Their Open Planet Ideas platform, powered by OpenIDEO and in collaboration with the World Wildlife Fund, claimed the award ahead of an impressive line-up of competitors. The GSB Awards aim to showcase genuine innovation in corporate sustainability plus recognise and reward those who take sustainability to the very heart of their businesses.

From the Guardian: Sony – Engaging Untapped Audience Through Crowdsourcing

"Sony was looking for a way to get people, from diverse and often untapped audiences, thinking in new ways about the sustainability challenges we all face.

So in September 2010, it set up an online open forum. Members of the public were invited first to share their ideas about the sustainability challenges that most concerned them and, then, to use seven innovative Sony technologies to invent new ways to tackle them...

Sony stuck with the idea because, it says, it was entirely in keeping with its corporate goal: to inspire people to imagine a better and more sustainable future and then to work with them to build it into reality...

Sony wanted to find a way to make sustainability more relevant to wider group of people. It wanted to reach a new audience, beyond those who are already green-aware and active. Creatives and technology enthusiasts were its new targets.

Although a challenging audience to reach, Sony saw that the involvement of these people would be vital if it was to inspire fresh thinking about how technology could be put to the service of sustainability...

In choosing Sony as this year's category winner, our own judging panel spent some time discussing what "communicating sustainability" really meant.

Did it just mean providing information to help consumers? Was it about telling people about the company's efforts and accomplishments? Or was it about enabling an actual and measurable change in behaviour?

The judges agreed it was probably a mixture of all three, but stressed that the last was very important."

Way to go Sony and all their switched on Open Planet Ideators!

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May 31st 2011
Congratulating Sony + Open Planet Ideas

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May 31st 2011 Congratulating Sony + Open Planet Ideas

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May 31st 2011
Congratulating Sony + Open Planet Ideas