A Global Ideas Competition Fosters Clean Tech Startups

Photo: Miroslaw Pieprzyk / Istock

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With three successful annual business competitions that have created 125 companies and 500 jobs under its belt, and the 2009 program well underway, the Cleantech Open is setting its sights on the global stage with the launch of the Global Cleantech Open. Through a partnership with the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the largest U.S. foundation devoted to advancing entrepreneurship and innovation, Global Cleantech Open is now a featured activity of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the event that connects young people everywhere through local, national and global activities designed to help them explore their potential as self-starters and innovators.

“As a result of private and public funding combined with growing environmental awareness, the next great innovation will likely come in the clean technology space, said Lesa Mitchell, vice president of Advancing Innovation at the Kauffman Foundation. "We hope that launching the inaugural Global Cleantech Open during Global Entrepreneurship Week will inspire more people to bring their ideas for environmentally sustainable technologies to light."

The Global Cleantech Open aims to foster and encourage clean tech big ideas from forward-thinking entrepreneurs from around the world as well as accelerate the development of clean tech solutions at a grassroots level. The Global Cleantech Open is an "ideas competition" that is open to innovators across the globe who are just getting started on groundbreaking concepts for technologies, products, marketing campaigns or systems that will solve large-scale energy and environmental issues. Life-changing ideas such as revolutionary ways to generate clean energy, to better ways to filter water, to views about how governmental policies around climate change can foster new businesses will be discussed in detail.

Competition Details

To enter the global competition, contestants simply need to submit an idea by Oct. 15, 2009. If selected, contestants will then present a five-minute pitch to a panel of judges in their home country. The individual or team with the top clean tech idea in each country will be flown to San Francisco, Calif., on Nov. 17 to attend a VIP reception and present their pitch to a live audience of 2,500 clean technology experts, investors and enthusiasts and press from around the world. There, a global winner will be selected and awarded at least $100,000 worth of startup services from seasoned clean tech experts. For entrepreneurs with a great green idea, there has never been a better time to transform it into a reality.

For more information, please refer to http://www.globalcleantechopen.org.

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