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BSR Conference
The New Climate for Business
Fairmont San Jose / San Jose, California
Past BSR Conferences
BSR18: A New Blueprint for Business
BSR17: How Business Leads
BSR16: Be Bold
BSR15: Resilient Business, Resilient World
BSR14: Transparency and Transformation
BSR13: The Power of Networks
BSR12: Fast Forward
Sustainability Consulting
Reports and Primers
BSR19: The New Climate for Business
November 12-4
BSR15: Resilent Business, Resilient World
Twelve Hours to Drive Sustainability, One Hack at a Time
Melanie Janin, Former Managing Director, Communications, BSR
#Information and Communications Technology,
Melanie Janin, Managing Director, Communications, BSR
At the BSR Conference last week in San Francisco, we held our first Sustainability Hackathon, hosted by Qualcomm, challenging developers and designers to produce a hack to help make the world a better place. Our ask of these hackers was simple, but the task was not: Overnight, use your creativity and skills to develop a working prototype to present early the next morning to the full Conference audience.
Close to 30 hackers registered on Thursday evening—some arriving in teams with ideas already in mind, others finding like-minded teammates and evolving their concepts on the fly. We had a great mix of hackers in the room, including professionals at large tech companies and small startups, students, and even a handful of BSR Conference attendees.
After working all night, participants demonstrated their creations early Friday morning to a small judging panel. We saw a variety of inspiring apps designed to report human rights abuses, track disaster relief, enable socially responsible investing, curb climate change, and more. We narrowed down the group to three finalists, who then presented in a rapid-fire, two-minute format on the plenary stage to all BSR Conference attendees. The audience then voted for the winner via the BSR Conference mobile app.
1st place: Windshed: A feature that pulls from multiple data streams to help eliminate congestion on the electrical grid relating to wind farms. It makes the grid more efficient, reducing energy prices and carbon emissions.
2nd place: Who Cares?: A website that makes supply chain practices transparent and uses crowdsourcing to evaluate those practices to rank companies. Users can view a photo story of supply chain practices and weigh in with their approval.
3rd place: We Can Help: A disaster response app that allows users to pre-volunteer their skills or resources as well as their location, which can be called quickly into action during a disaster. For example, the app will help connect people in need of medical assistance to local health professionals or others in need of a pick-up truck to identify one nearby that a volunteer has offered up.
To all the hackers who participated—thank you for your efforts and talent. We're inspired by your ideas and commitment to making the world better, one hack at a time. We hope to see some of you next year in New York at #BSR14!
For more information on the hacks, including source code and other details, please visit our Hackathon site.
#Information and Communications Technology
Scaling Impact: Tech Against Trafficking Launches Accelerator Program
Hannah Darnton, Manager, BSR
Tech Against Trafficking has launched an Accelerator Program, which aims to identify promising uses of technology in the anti-trafficking field and to harness the expertise and resources of member companies.
Is Stakeholder Engagement the Key to Successful Community Standards?
Alison Taylor, Managing Director, Sustainability Management, BSR; Dunstan Allison-Hope, Managing Director, BSR; Michaela Lee, Manager, BSR
Ongoing debates about leadership, governance, and regulation of social media are highly relevant to any stakeholder engagement discussion for platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter.
Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights: We Need to Talk about the Use Phase
Dunstan Allison-Hope, Managing Director, BSR; Michaela Lee, Manager, BSR; Hannah Darnton, Manager, BSR
Undertaking due diligence of artificial intelligence (AI) across all industries now is a matter of urgency and not something that can be put off into a distant future.
Supply Chain Sustainability in a Rapidly Changing World
Dunstan Allison-Hope, Managing Director, BSR; Tara Norton, Managing Director, BSR; Elisabeth Best, Manager, Sustainability Management, BSR
We share our thoughts, based on our work with Telenor, on relevant global shifts transforming telecommunications supply chains and best practices for companies in the industry to improve supply chain sustainability in the future.
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BSR™ is a global nonprofit organization that works with its network of more than 250 member companies and other partners to build a just and sustainable world. From its offices in Asia, Europe, and North America, BSR™ develops sustainable business strategies and solutions through consulting, research, and cross-sector collaboration. Learn more about BSR's 25 years of leadership in sustainability.
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BSR19: The New Climate for Business / November 12-14, 2019, San Jose, California
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