Friday Featured Friend -- Myoo Create

I’m really excited to introduce you to our Friday featured friend this week, Myoo Create (that’s “me & you” combined). Myoo Create is a new initiative with an all-embracing promise that if we're keen to collaborate, we can make a better future together. I love how this company is doing fantastic things combining sustainability-focused crowd-sourcing with brands, in order to come up with answers to sustainability challenges -- it's truly groundbreaking. In fact, Myoo Create is the first community online that is dedicated to crowd-sourcing innovative sustainability solutions, so it's got an exciting future ahead of it.

Launched in April this year, Myoo Create has quickly started making a positive difference with challenges already underway (see below). Essentially a community (kuh-Myoo-ni-tee) for environmental and social innovation, Myoo Create provides a space for people who share a passion for inspiring and co-creating a better world. It's a place where any of us can come together and apply our talents to challenges that matter, and the breadth and diversity of community are an important part of Myoo Create's philosophy.

Charlie O’Malley and Rebecca Petzel form Myoo Create's initial team. Motivated by the power of combining innovation and entrepreneurship to create lasting change for the better, they're people who are passionate about social and environmental change through collaboration. And they’re both very humble: Charlie says “I'm still learning about how change happens, but I'm excited about the contribution that Myoo Create can make. I think I have just about recovered from my education, but I still try every day to make sure I forget at least one thing I learned and to learn something different instead. As I get older, this gets easier and easier! I'm looking forward to plenty of unlearning on this Myoo Create journey.” Myoo Create’s team are wonderfully approachable and down-to-earth people, something I am totally convinced will have this project resonating with an ever-widening community for many years to come!

Rebecca explains that, as consumers, we can help increase the pace and effectiveness of change on issues such as waste, packaging, and use of energy and materials, by engaging directly with brands to suggest our ideas and innovations. In this way, sustainability comes about through what Rebecca terms "harnessing the global brain". Myoo Create facilitates the growing expectation we have as consumers that companies will listen to us and that we will to be able to interact with our favorite brands, taking an active role in the decision-making, especially when it comes to sustainability -- to bolster the point, Rebecca says that 80 percent of consumers have ideas on ways that companies can improve their sustainable practices!

Myoo Create connects organizations faced with environmental and social challenges to a community full of ideas, innovation, creativity, and solutions. It does this through the very simple process of having organizations post their environmental or social challenge with Myoo Create, along with offering a prize for the best sustainable solution.

In turn, the Myoo Create community submits suggested solutions to the challenge. The community as a whole then votes, as well as sharing thoughts and feedback on the contributions in order to ensure that the best contributions make it to the top. Once the winners are selected, the prizes are allocated and then, the solution just keeps on giving because the organization finds a great solution, the entrants and participants are rewarded for their efforts both financially, through being featured, and everyone benefits through ideas sharing and connecting. And, as Myoo Create says, “We all end up with a happier, saner planet.”

At the moment, Myoo Create is running an engaging and fun "Care to Air" design challenge with Levi's. This challenge started on June 1 and runs until July 31 (so you still have some time left to innovate!). After Levi's surveyed its supply chain, it discovered that almost 60 percent of the climate impact of a pair of jeans accumulates post purchase - hey, I'm thinking as I write this, that's when I'm washing and drying my jeans! Levi's realized that the messaging isn't only about improving its own processes but also draws in the consumer's washing and drying habits after purchase. While Levi's is doing its part to bring its carbon footprint down to zero and to build sustainability into everything it does, Levi's wants its customers to join in too. And the challenge is... to find groovy, neat, terrific, fantastic, inspiring, effective ways to dry your jeans. And given the increasing bans on clotheslines in North America (something I found very challenging when I lived there!), the best solution will be the one that combines style, sustainability and effectiveness, to overcome our very modern reticence to using natural drying approaches. So, if you've got some ideas, don't sit on them -- zip them into the Myoo Create community and you might just have the best idea awaiting discovery! (I'm going to ask my little dude what he thinks - he always has amazing creative ideas!)

My deep thanks to Rebecca Petzel of Myoo for taking the time to share her enthusiasm and information about the wonderful Myoo Create with me! You can join the community and leave your ideas, entries, and comments, as well as following Myoo Create on Twitter, or contact Rebecca or Charlie. And enter the Levi's Care to Air challenge here. And please feel free to share with us anything you're doing on Myoo Create.