What has black cardboard on the inside, a silver foil-covered outer box and can boil 10 litres of water in two hours, using only the sun’s rays? Right, it’s a solar cooker and a special one at that.

The Kyoto Box solar cooker by John Brohmer won the Climate Change Challenge which was sponsored by HP and organised by the Financial Times and Forum for the Future, a sustainable development charity. Among the judges were Mark Hurd, CEO, HP; Sir Richard Branson and Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC and a Nobel Prize winner, who chose the winner in conjunction with a public vote. The latter helped the Kyoto Box beat the nearly other 300 entries to the climate change challenge. You can read more about other shortlisted entries here.

I’m glad to see the prize ($75,000) go to the Kyoto box. While solar cookers have been around for some time, there is still a lot to be done to give more people access to this technology, at prices they can afford. On the Forum for the Future Blog, Shannon Carr-Shand says that this is the strength of the Kyoto Box: “What distinguishes this approach is that the cooker will be mass-produced cheaply in existing factories, the finished item is to be flat-packed for bulk transportation to end-users and it is extremely cheap at $6. The $75,000 prize money will enable Kyoto Energy to test durable, plastic versions of the cooker with 10,000 people currently burning fossil fuels to clean their water and heat their food.”

It’s great to hear from Shannon that approximately 23,000 people visited the challenge homepage to engage in the debate on how innovation can tackle climate change, as this is also the topic for an essay competition for postgraduate students that HP is supporting here in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. The deadline for the Ashridge Sustainable Innovation Award is this Sunday, May 17. To learn more about the award that we’re supporting together with WWF and EABIS, visit the Award website.

Ulrike Haug CSR Communications, HP EMEA