Innovation Award

The Innovation Award showcases organisations, coalitions or initiatives that are taking inventive approaches as they chart a course through a complex and changing external environment.

Now more than ever organisations need to innovate to survive. Factors such as a rise in the economic and political power of emerging countries, rapid urbanisation, demographic and climate change, increasing awareness of the earth's natural limits, changing geographies of conflict and poverty, and a changing understanding of the goals of development, all have potential to drive fundamental changes in the sector.

Are you innovating?

Our innovators are at home with rapid change and are driven by the desire to make a lasting contribution to development. You may have adopted new types of business models, purposed or repurposed your missions in ways that shake up understanding of how to make a positive difference, redefined how you work with the people or environments you serve, used technology in new ways, found new approaches to solving entrenched problems that affect people's lives or sought to shift entire systems rather than cure symptoms. You're thinking of the long-term and this might mean your organisation has taken some big risks – risks that may have led to failures, reiterations and learning.

Judging criteria

Entries will be judged on the following criteria:

• The narrative - how compellingly you explain your project
• The currency - how you interpret and respond to current global challenges, including your theory of change
• The reach - who and how many people were affected and how you measured this
• The impact - what is the likelihood of impact and sustainability

How to enter

Deadline for entries: 5pm on 13 October 2017. There are two stages to the application.

1. Complete the entry submission form (link below). Here you can provide information about the entry and explain why you think you should win. 
2. Submit either a short video (maximum 2 minutes and ideally in .avi or .mp4 format) or up to five images to accompany your submission. Please email this to awards@bond.org.uk. 

The video or images don’t need to be sent at the same time as the form, but both parts of the application need to have been received by 13 October. Your entry will not be considered if we do not have both parts of the application.

Please note: you have to be a Bond member to enter. Please read the terms and conditions before entering.

Submit your entry

Click here for the entry form

Last year's winners

Last year the Innovation Award was shared by CABI and Send a Cow. 

CABI’s Plantwise programme is helping to make plant health systems more effective for the farmers who depend on them by establishing plant clinics, where farmers can find practical plant health advice. 

Send a Cow's Taro project trained and supported 300 vulnerable smallholder farmers and their families in Ethiopia to form cooperatives to produce taro flour, making their vital form of sustenance available to their communities during food shortage months and raising their household income.