Ellie Horvath
Decarbonizing Farming by Hellon and Yara was honored in Fast Company’s 2022 Innovation by Design Awards, one of the most sought-after design awards in the industry as the winner of the Established Excellence category, alongside two honorable mentions in the categories of Impact and Sustainability.
The Innovation by Design Awards honor the designers and businesses solving today’s most crucial problems and anticipating tomorrow’s pressing issues. Now in its 11th year, the competition features a range of blue-chip companies, emerging startups, and hungry young talents. It is one of the most sought-after design awards in the industry. Honorees include products and services from Nike, Verizon, Microsoft, and others.
Yara, a global crop nutrition company, partnered with Hellon, to create a solution to support farmers in the green transition. Together with French farmers, they created a circular service that supports farmers in identifying and measuring the impact of their greener practices and connects them with operators along the food value chain to exchange low-carbon goods. In 2021, a pilot was launched with the aim of helping farmers produce low-carbon oilseed rape grain.
Hellon’s farmer-centric design process closely engaged farmers to understand their current challenges and needs to understand what they would need support when taking steps toward greener practices. The insights were used as prompts to ideate and innovate concepts that were tested to understand the most desirable, feasible, viable and positively impactful solutions to pilot in France.
The co-created sustainable circular model provides value to our society and planet and all parties involved. The solution enables ways to cut carbon from key steps of the farmer’s yearly harvest cycle that have been tailored to fit the farmers’ existing ways of working. This makes the service easy to adopt. The service is among the very first to bridge the gap between sustainability and profitability. The solution supports their financial independence, economic equality, and future potential to stay competitive within the market.
“Receiving these recognitions by Fast Company in the Innovation by Design Awards shows that human-centric design is exceptionally well suited for solving some of the world’s most complex problems. “Designing a win-win-win circular model requires openness to challenge conventions and the courage to explore new ways to operate from all the players in the value chain. It needs a “primus motor” to take the initiative; in this case, it was Yara”, Said Timo Patiala, Managing Director and Founding Partner for Hellon London.
“Decarbonizing Farming” reflects the integration of Yara’s mission to responsibly feed the world and protect the planet and the ambition of growing a nature-positive food future. We want to be part of the solution to the urgent challenge of making agriculture more sustainable. And we know that to truly succeed in doing so, we need to build collaboration across the industry through strong partnerships, such as those we have established through this initiative,” Continues Allison O´Dell, Marketing Director Continental Europe at Yara.
“A common theme among this year’s Innovation by Design honorees, which range from healthcare interfaces to autonomous driving technology, is permanence,” said Brendan Vaughan, editor-in-chief of Fast Company. “The products that leaped out to our editors and judges went against our quick-fix consumer culture, while also manifesting a more inclusive vision of design.”
The judges include renowned designers from a variety of disciplines, business leaders from some of the most innovative companies in the world, and Fast Company’s own writers and editors. Entries are judged on the key ingredients of innovation: functionality, originality, beauty, sustainability, user insight, cultural impact, and business impact.
Winners, finalists, and honorable mentions are featured online and in the October issue of Fast Company magazine, on newsstands September 27, 2022.
To see the complete list, go to https://www.fastcompany.com/innovation-by-design/list
About Fast Company
Fast Company is the only media brand fully dedicated to the vital intersection of business, innovation, and design, engaging the most influential leaders, companies, and thinkers on the future of business. Headquartered in New York City, Fast Company is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with our sister publication Inc., and can be found online at http://www.fastcompany.com.
About Hellon
Hellon is a pioneer in human-centric design and a leading Innovation Consultancy that was founded in 2009 with studios in London and Helsinki. Hellon supports companies to understand, innovate and transform their business and works in long-term partnerships with industry-leading companies such as Vodafone, Yara, Hyundai and Marimekko. Hellon works relentlessly to push the boundaries of the design discipline and aims to raise the human capacity of designers through utilization of in-house developed AI-powered tools.
