• by Erik Sass , Staff Writer @eriksass1, May 18, 2015

The Chief Marketing Officer Council is expanding its partnership with UNICEF’s Global Innovation Center with the launch of a new global online community, CauseTech.net, where members can crowdsource and share ideas, inventions, products, and technologies to help the UNICEF GIC in its mission of spreading ideas that can advance the cause of children in the developing world.

Powered by IdeaScale, CauseTech.net will bring together entrepreneurs, technologists, IT professionals, product developers, academics, post-graduate students and researchers, all under the aegis of the CMO Council and UNICEF, to create solutions to some of the most dire problems facing poor and socially marginalized children in 150 developing countries around the world.

CauseTech.net will advance these causes by allowing participants to share, vote, and discuss ideas, through contests and challenges developed by UNICEF workers and curated by UNICEF Innovation teams. The first official contest will launch June 1, 2015 through UNICEF’s Burundi Innovation Lab, and will focus on alternative energy solutions.

One example of an innovative tech-based solution is the Twerly self-powered streetlight, which uses wind and solar energy sources and can even provide WiFi and video surveillance to communities off the power grid.

The CMO Council and UNICEF have also partnered with the Business Performance Innovation Network and the Global Renewable Energy & Environmental Network to support the new on line community. Altogether these groups count over 12,000 senior level executives as members, with connections to major media and publishing groups, corporate research and development centers, universities, venture capitalists and angel investors.