Siemens, the world’s leading green infrastructure company, has launched a global competition – the “Empower people. Award” – to reward the best solutions to urban challenges in cities. The company is encouraging people across the world to provide innovative and sustainable solutions to address the pressing problems faced by developing countries.
The competition, which is open to all individuals, teams, organisations and enterprises, is initiated by Siemens Stiftung, a foundation set up by Siemens AG to encourage global citizenry in social causes. Through global initiatives like these, Siemens hopes to promote individual responsibility, self initiative and social entrepreneurship.
All applicants are expected to address a problem in one of the categories mentioned below and are encouraged to collaborate online with others with similar types of solutions. The categories for innovations are:
- Water & Waste Water: Entries should enable individuals or communities to create, maintain and manage their water supply.
- Energy: Entries could vary from a simple energy supply for a single machine to energy supply for households or the entire community.
- Food & Agriculture: Entries should help people maximize soil utility and, at the same time, save on resources. Food processing and distribution are important factors to be considered.
- Waste Management & Recycling: Entries should be long lasting solutions to improve solid waste management; ranging from solutions for composting and anaerobic digestion to various recycling approaches.
- Housing & Construction: Entries should include materials and methods for construction, the heating and cooling of houses in urban and rural zones, products for cooking and/or devices for everyday life.
- Healthcare: Entries could be sanitation infrastructure or simple instruments for medical use. E-solutions or technologies to educate individuals or communities on health and nutrition are a requirement.
- Information & Communication Technology: Entries should help build up communities, implement alerts, improve the market overview, and support communication in rural regions.
All solutions provided must be easily implemented with the resources available in their regions. Submissions will be evaluated according to technical feasibility, job creation, sustainability in terms of financial aspects and the potential impact of the solution in solving the problem.
The final evaluation and award decision will be made by a panel of jury who are independent and renowned individuals from technology, politics and developmental fields of work.
At the close of the competition, the inventions will be showcased in a central database on the website to allow developmental organizations to identify appropriate solutions to be implemented.
Entries for the Siemens “Empowering people. Award” must be submitted to www.empowering-people-award.siemens-stiftung.org by 31 December 2012 at 12pm (Singapore time). Further details are available at http://www.empowering-people-award.siemens-stiftung.org/
Siemens Stiftung was established in September 2008 to sustainably strengthen the social responsibility and commitment of the Siemens AG. It aims to empower people to actively address social issues and promote individual responsibility and self initiative. The foundation is committed to expanding basic services and social entrepreneurship, promoting education, and strengthening culture. For further information on Siemens Stiftung, please visit our website http://www.empowering-people-award.siemens-stiftung.org/about/
Disclaimer
Any statements in this document that are not historical facts are forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties; actual results may differ from the forward-looking statements. Siemens undertakes no obligation to publicly release the results of any revisions to these forward-looking statements that may be made to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.
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