Green ideas 2023- Promotion of the competition and design thinking workshop

With the spring comes our competition for #greenideas, and it’s time to awaken creative and business energy. On March 28, from 14:00 to 17:00 at Europe House Skopje, ARNO is organizing an event that will open the annual competition for green ideas and organize a mini-workshop through which participants will be able to experience design thinking techniques.

Registration is open to everyone (no age and region restrictions). To apply, all you have to do is fill out this form no later than 26.03 (23:59). Selected participants will receive confirmation by e-mail no later than 27.03.

The main goal of the event is to raise awareness of the importance of the green and social economy and to encourage citizens, organizations and small and medium enterprises to generate business ideas that have a positive social and environmental impact. At the event, we will also talk about success stories and ideas that come from regional programs, which ARNO has been implementing at the national level for years (RISE and Balkan Green Ideas). In Macedonia we can 🙂 proven!

Agenda of the event:

• Part One= What is #GreenIdeas? Introduction to green social economy, presentation of the competition, presentation of the application, questions and answers
• Second part = We design, means we understand: Introduction to design thinking, creativity exercises (wallet prototyping)

For those new to our programs and approaches, here is a brief description:

• Green Ideas is an annual competition that supports the development of small, local, green business ideas. Apart from our country, the competition is also held in Albania, Kosovo, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Greece. Every year, three representatives from each of the countries compete in a regional competition. The four representatives who will win the regional competition receive 10,000 or 5,000 US dollars for the realization of the idea in their country. ARNO has administered the competition at the national level for 9 years in a row, and is very proud to have regional winners each year.
• Design Thinking is an approach used by creative people all over the world, through which complex tasks are solved in order to reach an innovative solution. Design Thinking helps everyone to adapt to uncertain conditions, and put themselves in “others’ shoes” to more clearly understand and empathize with their challenges/needs, thus offering the highest quality and most effective solutions to problems. This may sound very theoretical, but design thinking means making something that will be useful and practical for someone (eg. what kind of toothbrush would a modern young person who travels often use (with a battery charger, with an alarm, easy to pack) ). Very often ARNO witnesses how the idea holders “fall in love” with their ideas, before even examining them with potential users, making it further more difficult to adapt them to the market (Ex. Do the raw spreads with a 3-day shelf life have a target audience that will pick them up from a location near Skopje). That’s why we want to present tools with which anyone who thinks about offering a product/service will have a chance to get acquainted with the stages of design thinking.