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 the 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.

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.

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:

Neither the H&M Foundation nor H&M group will take any equity or intellectual property rights in the innovations.

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.