In what is already a really big win for our company, Blue Badge Style will be sending a team to Madrid this October to compete in the European Social Innovation Tournament. We’re extremely proud to have been nominated for this prestigious European-wide award for entrepreneurial endeavours which aim to make our society a better and more inclusive place. It’s a true honour to be selected amongst other schemes which are helping to improve people’s well-being and, although we have yet to find out who else has made the final this year, a glance at winners from previous years gives an idea of the innovative and helpful businesses we will be competing against in Madrid to win the tournament and receive a healthy dose of financial reward too!
The Social Innovation Tournament, established by the European Investment Bank Institute in 2012, is the flagship initiative of its Social Programme. The Tournament seeks to promote the generation of innovative ideas and identify/reward opportunities promising substantial societal benefits or demonstrating best practices with tangible, scalable outcomes. It targets the creation of social value in relation to the fight against social exclusion. They’re looking for ideas that solve Europe wide problems, whatever they may be. Obviously in our case we’re solving problems relating to accessibility.
Out of one hundred and seventy one applications Blue Badge Style has been chosen for the final fifteen. Our selection among the 15 finalists for the EIB Institute’s Social Innovation Tournament 2014, means that we will be flying out to Madrid in October to present our work to a panel of business and academic specialists who will be designating the tournament winners and awarding prizes of 25 and 10 thousand euros (the presentations are all in English, thank heavens!). We’re really looking forward to it and are planning to take quite the delegation over to Spain to help out with the competition and to check out Madrid’s accessibility while we there. It should be a lot of fun and we’re looking forward to the whole thing, including the slightly nerve wracking prospect of the presentation itself.
To help all the finalists prepare for the competitions final stage, the EIB are also holding a Tournament Boot Camp in Budapest next month. The slightly smaller team we’re sending there can’t wait for this either as it’s a chance to meet the other finalists, hone our proposal and practice presenting. It’s another fabulous city to check out too and as we haven’t managed to review anywhere in Hungary yet we’re really looking forward to getting our first, second, third maybe more venues on the books. We’ve heard nothing but great things about Budapest from a style point of view, now it’s time to check out the accessibility.
So this Summer we’ll be saying “hola” to Madrid and “szia” to Budapest as BBS goes on tour as part of the Social Innovation Tournament. And if things go really well, we may just be coming back with the big prize!
We’re already so proud just to have been selected as finalists considering the whole of Europe are able to enter, but now we’re hoping we can go one better. Wish us luck – this is not the last you’ll hear on this!