Creating a Race to the Top by johnranford

Thank you Barnabe for your observations.

Yes, to some extent the concept is not novel, but the intention is that the combination of elements is probably novel. The social badge concept has not yet achieved a global breakthrough, and I believe that I have carefully studied and identified the shortcomings of other initiatives, and tackled these through a combination of innovative approaches. Much of these shortcomings are down to a lack of incentivisation that means these initiatives are not growing fast enough to achieve their goals. The Global Compact, for instance, is a really good initiative. However, when I ask around, few people have heard of it, and the last time I checked, it was growing at only 1000 companies a year. While these tend to be large companies, there are still 115 million other companies worldwide. We need an accelerated approach with an inbuilt marketing driver. I believe that is the difference. I believe that applying a range of existing and advanced techniques and strategies, we can make it work on an accelerated timescale. 

(As an analogy, my defence for this being a novel proposal is to compare it with Tesla. A car running on electricity is a concept that goes back over a century - but the Tesla car is probably novel in many ways.

The measurement of impact through crowdsourcing has been done in different spheres before, for instance through the Crowdcrafting platform. While there are similarities here, there are many projects that don't succeed, and this is largely due to the lack of a good incentivisation strategy. 

The pictures are merely the initial proof, and once the photos and accompanying claims are reviewed by other parties, they are no longer required. It is the score/points that are recorded.

On a final note, the Crowdcrafting platform could form a basis for an MPV, if we cut out some of the intended functionality. This could in theory, reduce the budget.