Deadline: October 17, 2018
Do you want to reinvent fashion? The Global Change Award could be your ticket to launch your dream project, transform the fashion industry and help protect the planet. The Global Change Award is one of the world’s leading challenges for early stage innovation, and the largest initiative of its kind in the fashion industry. They are looking for game changing ideas that can make the entire fashion industry circular and help protect our planet and living conditions.
The Global Change Award has become one of the world’s biggest challenges for early stage innovations, and the first such initiative in the fashion industry. Each year they call for ideas that could potentially reinvent the whole fashion industry. It’s been called the Nobel Prize of fashion and has so far received over 8,000 innovations from 151 countries.
Some of last year’s winning innovations were sustainable bio-textiles made by left-overs from food crop harvests, a dissolvable thread that facilitates repairing and recycling and using algae to make new materials as well as dye that is also good for the skin.
Focus Area
This year they keep an extra eye on digital innovations, as they have the potential to disrupt at the root and reinvent how things are done. Digital innovations can make significant impact on efficiency, planning and resource use – all the way from producing raw materials to a garment’s end of life. And – if the innovation involves an extra layer of social value – they like it even more.
Prizes
The five winners share a 1 million euro grant, and – perhaps more important than the financial contribution – get access to a one-year long Innovation Accelerator Program.
The winners of the Global Change Award 2019 will all receive:
- A trip to Stockholm to attend the Grand Award Ceremony in April.
- A share of the €1 million grant.
In addition to the financial grant:
- The Innovation Accelerator provides the teams with tailor-made support, tools, access and exposure to leverage and develop their innovations in the best and quickest way.
- The program takes the teams to Stockholm, New York and Hong Kong. This tailor-made program is provided by the H&M Foundation in partnership with Accenture, one of the world’s foremost strategy and consulting companies, and the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, one of Europe’s leading technical and engineering universities.
- Throughout the year, the winners get continuous support and individual team coaching through the H&M Foundation, Accenture and KTH.
Neither the H&M Foundation nor H&M group will take any equity or intellectual property rights in the innovations.
Categories
To encourage ideas from a broad circular scope, the Global Change Award 2018 features three categories open for applications. The five winners will be chosen regardless of category – there is no set quota between the categories:
- Digitalization: Apply digital technologies such as connectivity, robotics, artificial intelligence, data, internet of things etc. across the value chain including consumers and garments to make fashion circular.
- Climate positive: Create clothes, services and manufacturing processes that are not only neutral but actually good for the environment, helping to restore and regenerate the environment when being used.
- Waste: Recover the resource and value lost in material, energy and information waste, turning it into materials, products or services. Or simply eliminate waste in the first place.
Eligibility
- Open to individuals with early stage ideas presenting new circular approaches intended to reinvent the fashion industry;
- Innovation knows no national borders and H&M Foundation believes these early stage ideas can rest in anyone’s head anywhere on the planet, so in an effort to reach as many great minds as possible the challenge is open to any individual and groups of up to 5 people over 18 years of age anywhere in the world;
- It is also open for institutions, organizations and social business.
Application
Do you see opportunities where others see problems? Do you want to join us to reimagine the future of fashion, to protect the planetary boundaries and our living conditions? Do you have an innovation which is still in its early stage, but with the right funding and coaching, could be scalable and make a real impact? Apply to the Global Change Award.
The winners are revealed in April 2019 at a Grand Award Ceremony in Stockholm, Sweden.
For more information, visit Global Change Award.
