The Economist and InnoCentive issue Challenge to Reverse Climate Change

InnoCentive is now part of Wazoku

New York, NY. – September 13, 2010 – The Economist and InnoCentive, Inc. today announced the second Challenge in The Economist’s Ideas Economy Conference Series. The new Carbon Capture Challenge seeks to identify promising ideas for the biological capture and sequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In addition to winning a financial prize of $10,000 USD, the Challenge winner will also be invited to participate in The Economist’s Ideas Economy: Intelligent Infrastructure event on February 17 and 18, 2011, in New York City. Economist readers, InnoCentive’s Global Solver network, and other interested participants can submit solutions online from now through October 25.

“Reducing atmospheric carbon is an important step in fighting climate change,” said Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global correspondent for The Economist. “This Challenge seeks to identify new ideas that could have a substantial impact on the environment and are worthy of recognition and publicity.”

“There are few issues that have the global impact of climate change,” said InnoCentive CEO Dwayne Spradlin. “The solution must not only propose a method for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, it must be implementable on a huge scale, in a responsible and ecologically diligent fashion. InnoCentive and The Economist recognize the relevance and timeliness of this problem, and believe that our global communities are both qualified and motivated to bring a solution forward.”

The winner will be chosen by The Economist-InnoCentive Challenge advisory board which consists of Stewart Brand, co-founder and president of The Long Now Foundation and co-founder of Global Business Network; Michael E. Driscoll, founder of Dataspora LLC and co-founder of Metamarkets; Drew Endy, assistant professor of Synthetic Biology at Stanford University; Allen Norren, vice-president of online marketing at O’Reilly Media; and Vijay Vaitheeswaran, global correspondent for The Economist.

About The Economist (http://www.economist.com/)
 

Edited in London since 1843, The Economist is a weekly international news and business publication offering clear reporting, commentary and analysis on world politics, business, finance, science, technology, culture, society, media and the arts. The Economist has a North American circulation of 813,000, a global circulation of more than 1.4 million and 4 million monthly unique visitors at The Economist online. Because of its international editorial perspective, it is read by more of the world’s political and business leaders than any other magazine.

About the Ideas Economy Event Series
 

New in 2010 is the Ideas Economy event series. It will bring together journalists from The Economist with top thinkers from around the world to discuss and debate the most important ideas of our time; Innovation, Intelligent Infrastructure and Human Potential, and other issues. The inaugural event, “Innovation: Fresh thinking for the ideas economy,” was held in Berkeley, Calif. on March 23 and 24, 2010. For more information about Economist conferences and the Ideas Economy series, visit http://ideas.economist.com/.

About InnoCentive, Inc.
 

Since 2001, InnoCentive has helped corporate, government, and non-profit organizations to better innovate through crowdsourcing, strategic consulting services and internal Software-as-a-Service offerings. The company built the first global Web community for open innovation where organizations or “Seekers” submit complex problems or “Challenges” for resolution to a “Solver” community of more than 200,000 engineers, scientists, inventors, business professionals, and research organizations in more than 200 countries. Prizes for winning solutions are financial awards up to US $1,000,000. Committed to unleashing diverse thinking, InnoCentive continues to introduce new products and services exemplifying a new corporate model where return to investors and individual passion go hand in hand with solving mankind’s most pressing problems. https://www.innocentive.com/

For more information contact:
Amy Jaick
Communications Manager, The Economist
AmyJaick@economist.com
212-641-9834

Connie French
InnoCentive Marketing Director
press@innocentive.com