Katerva Awards: An Open Source Approach To Sustainability

While in NY this week I had a chance to catch up with my old college buddy Tyler Schaeffer. Tyler is the CMO of Katerva, the sponsors of the Katerva Awards. Katerva and the awards they sponsor are a worldwide effort to highlight and facilitate innovation in sustainability across ten economic, social and environmental categories.  The categories cover a diverse range of interests including Energy & Power, Urban Design, Behavioral Change and Materials & Resources.  

Katerva and their network of leaders in each of these categories are nominating teams in each of these areas. The Grand Prize winners of the Katerva Award is picked by the Katerva Awards Council with sustainability luminaries such as Jeremy Rifkin, President of the Foundation on Economic Trends, Jean-Michel Cousteau, Explorer, Environmentalist, and Educator and Dr. J Craig Venter, American Biologist known for sequencing the human genome, among others.

The neat thing about what Katerva is doing is they are bringing open source principles and crowd sourcing techniques to further the dissemination of some of these great ideas for sustainability. Somehow it just seems right that we should use open source in helping us helping the planet with sustainability.

Speaking to Tyler about what Katerva is doing he says “we need the world and the world needs us”. There is so much good work and research being done in each of these categories. However, because so much of it is done in their own silos, the knowledge and experience gained can not be leveraged across disciplines.  Katerva by being the clearinghouse for this information seeks to change this. More than publicizing, they want to bring collaboration to these projects. The collaboration cannot take place with the free flow of information. So it is very much a win-win equation for Katerva, the teams working on the sustainability projects and those who get to share the knowledge gained.

The top ten category winners will be announced in October. The Grand Prize winner and the People’s Choice winner will be announced at the Katerva Awards show at Lincoln Center on December 7, 2011. A winners circle of world-class companies will providetheir products and services to accelerate the winners growth and impact on a global level unleashing unprecedented levels of menatingful sustainability innovation. There have been over 300 nominees from thousands of the worlds best sustainability innovations. 

You can find out more about Katerva and the Katerva awards at https://www.katerva.org.