The BIDC congratulates Red Diamond Compost on winning the 2020 Talent and Innovation Competition (TIC) of the Americas Caribbean Innovation Competition (CIC) with its Climate Adaptation Ecosystem Initiative.
The TIC Americas CIC is executed by the Young Americas Business Trust (YABT). CIC is an international entrepreneur competition and business start-up accelerator for young people in the CARICOM Member and Associate States.
The CIC incorporates “before and after” stages, focusing on training and mentoring as preparation for the competition, and provides follow up services that include access to finance, networking activities, visibility and promotion opportunities.
The Red Diamond Compost team was chosen to participate in the finals after a rigorous evaluation process by more than 130 international experts from different fields.
According to TIC Americas, “in this edition, TIC Americas received 2,085 registered teams from all over the continent”.
Founder of Red Diamond Compost, Joshua Forte, describes the winning Climate Adaptation Ecosystem Initiative as “a direct regenerative and holistic response to the climate challenges that we’re faced with”.
The approach by Red Diamond Compost is in line with principles of nature, allowing us to take direct action that spans across climate change, food and nutrition security, building climate resilience and improving agricultural productivity simultaneously.
He explained their solution, adding: “We’ve developed a matrix whereby we can identify available organic resources of any kind, in a specific geographic location, and match that against the agricultural needs and special challenges [in that location] and therefore develop specific solutions from the organic resources for those agricultural needs.”
The win for the local company is commendable and the Corporation looks forward to supporting more innovative Barbadian companies.
In support of the company’s efforts, the BIDC sponsored Red Diamond Compost with access to a professional meeting space with quality Wi-Fi access at its Small Business Development Centre. The sponsorship helped to facilitate its presentation in the virtual finals of the TIC Americas Caribbean Innovation Competition.
Mr. Forte conveyed his gratitude on behalf of the team: “A huge thank you to BIDC for providing the location for us to give our pitch and presentation at the TIC Americas Caribbean Innovation Competition 2020.
“It’s been an amazing journey thus far, even working with the BIDC throughout the ClimateLaunchpad (CLP) boot camp through to the Barbados National Finals, then the Global Grand Finals in 2019.”
Following their involvement in the ClimateLaunchpad Barbados programme, the company has continued to advance their innovation and creativity. Mr. Forte gave an update on the business’ activities since returning to Barbados in November of 2019.
“Since then, we’ve been working tirelessly to refine our business model and design. The CLP global grand final experience gave us a much clearer vision, especially coming into 2020, for what we wanted to accomplish and exactly how to do so, what steps we needed to take to achieve it. That’s what we’ve been working on and I believe the results have been shown in this win from the TIC Americas Caribbean Innovation Competition. We’re definitely looking forward to our successes to come.”
Red Diamond Compost was the first-place winner of ClimateLaunchpad Barbados in 2019, a competition for cleantech start-ups that was executed by the BIDC, in partnership with the Caribbean Climate Innovation Center.
Sponsorship support towards their attendance at the Global Grand Final was secured through the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation, the Caribbean Climate Innovation Centre and Williams Solar.
The ClimateLaunchpad programme is part of the entrepreneurship offerings by EIT Climate-KIC, the European Union’s innovation programme for climate change.
Red Diamond Compost’s Sargassum sea-weed biologic soil treatment product-pitch secured a local win that advanced the business to represent the island and participate in training at the ClimateLaunchpad Global Grand Finals in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.