Partner: Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance Limited (LRQA)
About Lloyd's Register Quality Assurance Limited (LRQA):
LRQA is a leading independent provider of Business Assurance services including certification, validation, verification and training. The Group enhances the safety of life, property and the environment by helping their clients to ensure the quality construction and operation of critical infrastructure.
LRQA brings a well-established global networks as well as a high level of technical climate change expertise to the E-idea programme. E-idea gives the young winning entrepreneurs the opportunity to work with LRQA’s global business network of 60,000 clients.
About E-idea:
E-idea is a programme co-developed and launched in 2011 by the British Council and Lloyd’s Register Quality Assurance (LRQA) that funds and mentors young eco-entrepreneurs in Australia, China, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Thailand and Vietnam who have ideas that can make a real, practical contribution to the region’s environmental future and innovation.
Chosen through a competition, the eco-entrepreneurs receive technical, marketing, and financial support as well as international training, networking opportunities and access to LRQA’s global business network to gain the leadership, business, project management, fundraising and communications skills they will need to bring their E-ideas to fruition.
The E-idealists’ projects address some of the biggest environmental challenges in the region. These include mitigating the ecological damage caused by mining in Indonesia, improving water quality in Vietnam and speeding up the growth of mangrove forests in Thailand.
In Tokyo, an E-idea winner is commercialising sleek hand-cranked power generators for mobile devices while in Shanghai another winner, is reducing heat, smog and energy consumption by installing gardens, solar panels and rainwater collection systems on rooftops of buildings.
E-idea aims to promote encourage and inspire eco-entrepreneurs to share ideas and success stories with the general public.
Partner’s involvement and benefit:
“The E-idea is a major opportunity for LRQA to make a proactive, creative and dynamic contribution to climate change. Through E-idea, we are contributing directly to society by supporting these young environmental leaders, and are actually investing in the future by doing something tangible for the environment”
Simon Batters, LRQA Project Director for E-idea.
LRQA’s role involves supporting the competition, providing seed money, mentoring and networking opportunities to the winners. By doing this, they are supporting innovation to mitigate the effects of climate change with real financial investment, and applying their climate change expertise in a proactive and creative way.
Robert Hansor, LRQA’s Head of Climate Change and CSR in Asia, said, “Supporting a new wave of entrepreneurs across Asia who see that profit and environmental sustainability are not mutually exclusive is important for LRQA. E-Idea provides an outstanding platform that brings people together and provides what every young entrepreneur with a good idea needs: attention and funding to get started. I have no doubt that these eco-entrepreneurs will help create a smarter and cleaner future, and inspire others to follow in their footsteps.”