Back in October the Forum launched a competition for sets of our Disruptive Innovation Cards. Entrants were asked to tell us how they would use the cards to disrupt for sustainability. We had a really positive response with entries from as far afield as New Zealand, the US and Brazil.

After serious consideration we managed to whittle the entrants down to five winners, they are:

• Ed Kellow, LEAD International who will use the cards to train 150 LEAD Associates on sustainability, who in turn train people in 33 countries
• Ron Mader, Planeta.org who wants to translate the cards into Spanish and create an iphone/online application for them
• Michelle Thomasson who will use the cards with economic advisors and filming the process to disseminate online
• André Winter, Brazil who is organising a series of events in parallel to COP15
• Stuart Jones, PLATO: Sustain who will use the cards in work with 160 business leaders in South East England

All entrants will receive an electronic version of the cards too.

“We set up the competition as a little experiment to get ideas for developing and using the cards. We were delighted and surprised by the level of response and the range of ideas. Hopefully we will get valuable feedback from all those who entered and create a valuable tool”  - Hugh Knowles, Principal Advisor

Innovation guru Clayton Christensen coined the term disruptive technology or innovation, as “that which improves a product or service in ways that the market does not expect”. The sustainable economy of the future depends on just such disruptions to move us away from current unsustainable technologies and business models at the pace we need.

At the Forum we’re always looking for innovative new ways to approach sustainability. The cards were developed to help innovators come up with game-changing, disruptive ideas - each one capturing a different method of thinking ‘outside the box’.

We’re keen to catalyse these disruptions for sustainability and we’re putting together plans for Disruptive Innovation in 2010 and beyond, and our set of 12 cards is a first step. We’ve started to use these internally, with our partners and for larger projects, and initial feedback suggests we’ve hit on something rather exciting!

Find out more about the Forum’s innovation work.