2014 Winners Born!
We have received over 320+ submissions this year from over the 20 Asian countries and cities and after a tough deliberation by our judges, the Asian and Hong Kong winners are finally born! SVhk would like to thank all participants and to congratulate all the winners! Learn more

Asia Social Innovation Award 2014

To Get Everyone Think Social
Social Enterprise + Innovation = Change!

Innovation is always critical in solving problems. We believe this theory also applies to social issues! Meanwhile, social issues in different Asian cities are indeed quite similar, which provides a common ground for us to discuss the solution together.

The Asia Social Innovation Award is thus created as the first step to enhance creativity and stimulate the development of social entrepreneurship in ASIA.

You can also be a change-maker!

We believe that the urban social challenges in many Asian cities are quite alike, these pressing problems need to be solved immediately, and whenever the traditional model does not satisfy the needs of the society, innovations are demanded.

"Social Enterprise" has become a hot topic in recent years. However people tend to focus their discussion on the entity itself, instead of the more powerful concept behind that leads to ultimate social change - "Social Innovation", which is also relatively weak in Asia, creating a big barrier for social entrepreneurship to groom in the region.

However, from a worldwide perspective, social enterprises have undeniably brought great positive impact worldwide. For instance, social enterprise accounts for 1% of the GDP in UK. In fact, social enterprises contribute tremendously in creating a culture of social innovation among communities.

In order to promote the culture of social innovation and enrich people’s knowledge on social issues, and to build a platform to encourage the sharing of ideas and experience among Asian cities, the Asia Social Innovation Award has been born since 2008, hoping to pathway for a sustainable development of social innovation culture in the region.

The Award will be the first innovative social enterprise event in Asia to apply a simple and easy mechanism to engage the general public to participate in the discussion, and to deliver positive and concrete innovative solutions to tackle these problems.

We hope that this simple idea-generating competition calling for level-zero social innovation ideas will be able to attract the general public to take part.

So, it's now time for us to brainstorm some creative ideas, and you too can bring about a social revolution. Make use of your imagination, and change might be initiated by you in the society!

Supporting Partners

Call for Solutions

Please pick one of the following social agenda, and propose an innovative social enterprise concept using 200-500 words. You may also submit your idea in a video format.

Agenda 1: Aging Population

According to United Nation’s report, the number of people aged 65 and above in Asia is expected to grow from 206 million in 2000 to 857 million in 2050, which will then account for 18% of the total population. The problem may come rapid and even occur at the stage of early economic development. This is foreseen to pose a great challenge on the healthcare and social welfare system. However, at the same time, an increase in number of elderlies will also expand the seniors market, creating loads of business opportunities. These opportunities do not only refer to the traditional healthcare products, like walking stick or wheelchair, but also entertainment tailor-made for elderlies.

What innovative ideas can you come up with to cater the needs of the elderlies in a sustainable way?

Agenda 2: Poverty

Although most Asian countries are making an effort to combat poverty, it still remains as a serious problem. Referencing World Bank’s statistics in 2010, near 700 million living with income under USD$1.25 a day. Besides extreme poor, other forms of poverty emerge, such as working poor in developed cities. They all encounter difficulties in making their ends meet, including but not limited to food, nutrition, education and housing. To make matter worse, poverty is usually generational. Poor parents cannot afford a sound environment with education to their offspring, which make them only capable of working in low-income position in the future, leading to a vicious circle.

What can we do to improve the lives of the underprivileged and enhance their quality of life in a sustainable and creative way?

Agenda 3: Environment

Most Asian cities are in their industrial development stage, creating different kinds of pollution and environmental problems. Besides, consumerism arises in more developed Asian cities, and consequently creates huge amount of waste. Do you have any innovative ideas for us to achieve sustainable development in environmental aspect?

Agenda 4: Hidden Youth

The problem of hidden youth is particularly prominent in developed regions in Asia, namely, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong. It is foreseen that similar problem will also occur in other regions of Asia as the technology advances. On individual level, hidden youth usually have problems in fulfilling their social needs, which hence increase their chances of having mental illnesses. On society level, having hidden youth leads to a loss in productivity. Thus, we cannot let the situation persist. However, unlike other social issues, which can be easily identified, hidden youth are nearly impossible to spot; and even help is offered, they may be reluctant to accept.

How can you motivate the hidden youth to return back to society or help them to improve their living environment?

Judging Criteria

Criteria include originality, viability and sustainability of idea. Apart from imaginative and innovative ideas or concept, existing ideas are also welcomed.

Judges

Submission Period

Application is opened now!

Asian region participants
Deadline: 23:59 on 13th September 2014 (Saturday) (Hong Kong Time)

Hong Kong participants
Deadline: 23:59 on 5th October 2014 (Sunday) (Hong Kong Time)

Online Voting Period
10th October to 19th October 2014
Only applicable to Hong Kong contestants. Result from online voting will account for 20% of "Best Branding Award". Please visit www.likefunding.me during the online voting period and choose your favour project.

Award

• Three awards will be given respectively for “Hong Kong” and “Other Asian Cities”, which are “Best Branding Award”, “Best Development Potential Award” and “Best Potential Change-maker”; another award “Multimedia award” will be offered to Hong Kong participants who submit multimedia presentation.
• HK$ 2,000 (US$ 250) cash plus trophy for each award winner.
• Hong Kong winners: One-year membership in the “House of Social Innovators” to meet professional firm partners to seek for support in their projects.
• Asia winners: Free air ticket and accommodation from Asian countries to Hong Kong for the Award Presentation Ceremony in Social Enterprise Summit, which will be held from November 3 to November 4, 2014.

¹ List of qualified Asian countries/cities, subject to the addition or removal of countries at the sole discretion of SVhk:
Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Burma, Cambodia, China, East Timor, India, Indonesia, Japan, Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam.

Results Announcement & Award Presentation Ceremony

The winning ideas from Other Asian Cities will be posted in Mid-October, and the winners will be notified individually.

The Award Presentation Ceremony for "Hong Kong" and "Other Asian Cities" will be held in Early-November.

You can learn more about the past year’s winning ideas at the Asia Social Innovation Award 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013 website.

About the House of Social Innovators

With the support of corporate partners and other SE-related organizations, Social Ventures Hong Kong would like to further expand the event, by inviting ASIA2012’s finalists and winners to join the House of Social Innovators.

Formed under the collaboration of various SE-competitions, together with alumnus of these competitions, HoSI is a platform that will provide on-going support to passionate social entrepreneurs to transform social innovative ideas to sustainable social enterprise and to nurture investment-ready social enterprises and bring it to the marketplace.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Do I need to work on all 3 social issues?

For each application, you only need to suggest an idea that addresses one of the social issues. You can at most submit 3 separate applications, each of them tackling one of the given problems.

How can I submit my application?

Applicants are only allowed to type out their idea or upload their video to YouTube and submit their application online. Please email us if you experience any difficulties submitting your idea online.

Can I participate as a team?

Whilst you can participate in the Award as a team, if you are residing outside of Hong Kong and in the event that your idea is chosen as a winning idea, SVhk will only provide return air tickets and accommodation for one member within your team. Of course other members can join the award presentation ceremony held in Hong Kong at their own cost.

What is Best Branding Award? How is it judged?

Best Branding Award aims to recognise the social innovation idea that has built itself an excellent brand for marketing, i.e. people can easily recall the idea after they have come across it. It is judged by the overall impression that your idea gives to the judges. For example, your project name, logo, tagline and their coherence with your idea will be some of the items that affect your idea's impression!

Why am I asked to submit a logo?

Logo submission is optional. We do not particularly add or deduct marks with regard to that. However, a decent logo that matches your social innovation idea has a chance in enhancing the whole branding image, which increases the competitiveness of your idea in the Best Branding Award.

Is the submission of video mandatory in obtaining the prizes?

Video submission is only mandatory for Hong Kong contestants who would like to compete for the Multimedia Award. Even though if you do not aim for that particular award, you are still free to submit a video explaining your idea. They will still be provided to the judges and this may help in better explaining your idea to them.

Is there any format for submitting the logo and video?

We do not set particular format for logo and video except that the logo should be in jpg format. As long as they can be submitted through filedropper and YouTube, they should all work fine.

Can I submit in other languages other than English and Chinese?

The judging panel will only judge those ideas that are in English or Chinese. If you unable to fulfill this requirement, please consult the organization you belong to, and see if they will be able to translate the main theme of your idea into the appropriate language.

When will the results be announced?

Winners will be contacted individually while we do not have specific dates as to when winners will be contacted, you can expect us to reach our to winners about one month before the Award Presentation Ceremony to allow sufficient time to arrange for transportation (for Asian winners). The results will be announced on this website after the Award Presentation Ceremony.

Terms & Conditions

1. Only residents of the Hong Kong SAR may participate under the Hong Kong SAR regional category. Residents of other Asian countries please enter under "Other Asian Cities".
2. The Organizer is only responsible for a round-trip economy class air ticket to and from a designated port of departure within the list of qualified Asian countries to Hong Kong. The round-trip air ticket is capped at maximum subsidy of US$1,000 through the cheapest travelling means obtained by the Organizer
3. The Organizer has the power to arrange for, change or cancel the travel plans of the Asian winner without prior notice or compensation.
4. The round-trip air tickets cannot be converted into cash.
5. All participating proposals may be published on the Award website or any other media, to share the ideas with the public.
6. Social Ventures Hong Kong reserves the final power to interpret and amend such terms and conditions of the Award.

We have received over 330+ submissions this year from all across Asia and after a tough deliberation by our judges, the results are finally out! We would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the winners and all the participants for their truly innovative ideas. The judges were highly impressed with the quality of submissions received this year and it was a very difficult choice to select only one winner from each category. We hope you have enjoyed the process of thinking social and strongly encourage you to ask your family and friends to do the same.

To keep up-to-date with Social Ventures Hong Kong (SVhk)'s future competitions, events or announcement, please don't forget to like us on Facebook or to subscribe to our mailing list. Once again, thank you all for your efforts and we appreciate your creativity and innovation.

Below are the winners of the 2014 Award:

Asian Winners

	Best Development Potential Award Poverty English Name: Pravesh Vijay Kochar Country of Residence: India Idea: The Parallel Economy Of-For-By the Poor - This social enterprise creates correlated growth cycles in the rural illiterate farmers and the urban educated youth. This social enterprise proposes the creation of “Farming Conglomerates” that pool together similar harvest generating farmers across villages, enabling them to directly source to companies. Each such conglomerate is equipped with urban educated youth to prevent exploitation and helps them utilize communication and other technical services. Once a large number of such conglomerates exist, free market dynamics force a price equilibrium and efficient production. In order to break the vicious circle of illiteracy-induced poverty, we create educational opportunities for the children of these farmers. We can get this funded by the consumer companies for a dual benefit – social upbringing and better partner relations. The farmers become business partners of the multinationals. Better education provides their future generation access to broader spectrum of careers, steadily improving the standard of living of these families. The teachers are urban educated youth. Analogously the youth can teach at the primary level, filling huge vacancies in teaching positions in India. With a little normalizing training each of them can perpetuate the learning to the younger generations interlinking the education requirements of the rural India with the employment needs of the urban educated. Reason for being passionate about the social issue Being among the top 1% of my countrymen, I have always felt sorry of the increasing disparity between the rich and the poor in India. As responsible citizens, I believe it is our collective responsibility to give back to the society which has made us what we are today. The fact that providers of the most important requirement of our lives – food, are living in a state of miserable poverty is truly despicable. On the other hand, I see people slogging day in and day out in odd jobs in cities, just because they have no employment opportunities. Is this what we call growth? There is an incident that I would wish to share which motivates me till date. I was on excursion to a rural town about 5 years back as a part of my school trip. Over there, I met a boy who used to work as a cobbler, to sustain himself. However the interesting part was that he had a great skill of building mechanical fits to help in daily work. He had built an irrigation system for his farm, a mechanical cutter used for harvesting and a cycle powered water pump. It was then that I realized that a lot of talent gets wasted in India just because of lack of opportunities. What if all such boys could be nurtured and brought out in the open? What if each of them started to help themselves rather than wait for someone else? The excitement of having to lead such talented countrymen truly makes me passionate about this proposed enterprise.
	Best Branding Award Poverty English Name: Tang Thi Duyen Hong Country of Residence: Vietnam Idea: Marine Gifts (MG), established in 2011, is the first Vietnamese Social Enterprise focus on empowering women living in and around Marine Protected Areas (MPA) of Vietnam. Local women are trained to make handicrafts products and provide community – based ecological/cultural tourism services, provide their products and render services to travelers via our stores and online channels. With capital gains, we organize vocational, living-skills training and raise awareness on marine conservation for local people and thereby contribute to balancing of government’s conservation purposes and local’s development needs. The idea of MG comes from the founders’ ten-year experience in supporting development of livelihoods for local people in MPAs with support from Ministries of Vietnam. Those experience ends up with in-depth knowledge and understanding about the women lives and hopes and strong supporting networks for the business. MG has successfully set up 7 local women groups, providing jobs and income for 200 poor women who have no job and income before joining us. Reason for being passionate about the social issue I was born in a poor coastal village located in Nghe. Since I was a small girl, I have learnt about the difficult living condition of poor coastal women, who have to put themselves under seawater more than 10 hours everyday to collect sea products and sell at the village market with a very cheap price. Graduated at Hanoi University of Cultural, faculty of tourism, I have been traveling around the country as well as many other countries in the world. Work gave me chances to thoroughly understand about the difficult living condition of coastal poor women, why they are poor and how to help them overcome their challenge. I found Marine Gifts after 13 year working for many NGO, government organisation and private company working in many filed related to poor coastal women and believe that with our strong passion and knowledge, experience in the field, and a strong management team, we will lead the social enterprise to its targeted goal!
	Best Potential Change-maker Poverty English Name: uknowiknow Corporation Country of Residence: Taiwan Idea: "uknowiknow Corporation" Education has long been perceived as a fundamental way to tackle hierarchical issue and wealth discrepancy. However, due to the lack of resources and distanced living, a group of children who are willing to learn but cannot learn what they love and living what they like, not to mention feeling hopeless to their future. “Let Them Learn” tries to break current limitations, using collective efforts to realize their dreams and genuinely let them learn. Let Them Learn gathers individual effort to solve education problems. Initiators (Teachers from primary and secondary school, NPOs) apply on the platform of Let Them Learn. Let Them Learn matches initiators and qualified teachers who can fulfill the needs. After details of courses, such as content and learning hours are confirmed, sponsorships are open to individuals and corporate. A new course will be set up on the platform. With sufficient sponsorships, the right to learn is no longer limited to the ordinary model, but on Let Them Learn. Reason for being passionate about this social issue I grew up in a village in Southern Taiwan. Due to gambling issue of my grandfather, he lost all family properties. No one in my father’s generation, therefore, graduated from national universities in Taiwan. I am the only one in my generation who hold a degree. It is not because of our ability to learn but the lack of financial resources. We are forced to drop out of school and start working or taking schools which do not require tuition fee. I discovered that the problem of poverty does not only come from education but also the right to receive education. I worked at a community service center focusing on original inhabitants and went to the Eastern Taiwan for a month. I was a reporter for five years, going to different communities to observe social problems. I learnt that poverty does rise from education from experience of children in Taiwan. The only solution is to find the right teacher, giving learning incentives to children, sufficient resources and let them see various opportunities. This allows different hierarchies to mobilize and the poverty has the new chance.

Hong Kong Winners

	Best Development Potential Award Environment English Name: HKDI DESIS Lab for Social Design Research Idea: Open Diamond Project - Open Diamond Project refines the definition of death and encourages people to examine the meaning of death. It aims at encouraging citizens to prepare for their own dying matters through designing their own diamonds and promote the advance technology as a really sustainable lifestyle. There are three components in this project, namely living diamond, eternal diamond and death diamond. Living diamond is a developing tool to get people to design their own diamonds as part of their living wills; Eternal diamond allows people and his/her family to design the unique diamond and jewelries to extant love and the legacy of their loved ones; Death diamond provides a series of specially designed Death diamond to public so that they can chose one which suit him/her. This project was initiated to promote long-term social change, using technology, which turns ashes into diamonds, combining environmental protection and life education in the hope of creating sustainable and meaningful life for society.
	Best Branding Award Environment English Name: Samathy Woo Man Shan Idea: JupYeah Cooperative has been working on a better redistribution of useful goods by organizing swap parties and operating a virtual platform to encourage citizens to share useful but unwanted goods with others, and to get their material needs satisfied from our versatile pool of used goods. It is a platform where people share unwanted things and find values from others' old stuff. It is believed that such a little sharing action could reduce wastes and overconsumption. Juppers, members of JupYeah Cooperatives, build relationships with others by sharing goods and conversing about their shared interested. More importantly - we are building a socially active but environmental friendly lifestyle. Instead of a deep ecological approach, the modern, accessible platform of JupYeah can inspire and influence general citizens - the drive behind the unsustainable lifestyle - to change. Reason for being passionate about the social issue Because we are not individual islands - we are in this together and our collective behaviors can bring significant impacts, positive or negative.
	Best Potential Change-maker Hidden Youth English Name: Kassey Tam Ka Man Idea: Makeover - The vision of Makeover is to be the inspiration for hidden youths to recognize and consolidate the true value of them. The mission is to transform hidden youths from within and act as a connection for them to the society and let them find the self-value by contributing to the society. Makeover acts as a Human Resources Agency between Beauty Retail/ Beauty Salon, organizing courses or training to those hidden youth, ranging from personal grooming, interpersonal skills and positive psychology, but not limited to sharing sessions/workshops from successful “graduates” of our courses, the aims is to equip themselves to work and to stay connected to the society. Reason for being passionate about the social issue The founder came from an unprivileged family and I've been dealing with financial burden since my parent got divorced. She was quite shameful on my background and has developed a low self esteem since then. She has a huge passion for makeup, and got into a beauty retail after Secondary 5. During the year of full-time working, she started believing in herself. Then she got back to school for further studies since she believes the transformation can be done by education. She believes cosmetics has the magical power for people to transform from within and get in touch with their inner self, and therefore, would like to share and inspire those hidden youths with my stories and utilizing experience in Cosmetics industry to pay back to the society.

Best Multi-media Award

Environment English Name: HKDI DESIS Lab for Social Design Research Idea: Open Diamond Project - Open Diamond Project refines the definition of death and encourages people to examine the meaning of death. It aims at encouraging citizens to prepare for their own dying matters through designing their own diamonds and promote the advance technology as a really sustainable lifestyle. There are three components in this project, namely living diamond, eternal diamond and death diamond. Living diamond is a developing tool to get people to design their own diamonds as part of their living wills; Eternal diamond allows people and his/her family to design the unique diamond and jewelries to extant love and the legacy of their loved ones; Death diamond provides a series of specially designed Death diamond to public so that they can chose one which suit him/her. This project was initiated to promote long-term social change, using technology, which turns ashes into diamonds, combining environmental protection and life education in the hope of creating sustainable and meaningful life for society.

The winners will be presented with their awards at the Social Enterprise Summit held in Hong Kong in early-November, 2014.

Want to read even more brilliant ideas? You can read about the past year’s winning ideas at the Asia Social Innovation Award 2010, 2011, 2012 & 2013 website.

Award Presentation Ceremony 2013

Social Ventures Hong Kong (SVhk)

Being one of the social entrepreneurship intermediates in Hong Kong, Social Ventures Hong Kong (SVhk), has dedicated itself in promoting this concept through practicing venture philanthropy in supporting social innovation projects. At the same time, SVHK will promote social entrepreneurship by providing training, consultancy and organize promotion events in various sectors.