Over the last 10 years, gaming culture has grown exponentially across all age groups and genders. From enjoying record-breaking retail numbers to hosting events that attract tens of thousands of fans, gaming has officially left the basements of the world and become one of the main attractions on the world stage.

Gaming and its underlying principles aren’t just restricted to consoles and PCs, though. Gamification is a motivational method that’s increasingly making its way into many organizations. By applying game design elements into non-gaming situations, the practice actively engages teams and individual members. For example, say a real-world business goal is to reach a certain monthly benchmark. Teams can “gamify” the rules and milestones of that practical target to motivate each “player” to do his or her best and, ultimately, to decide a winner.

PentaQuest is an Australian-based company that helps organizations perform better by gamifying individual preferences. These preferences then optimize organizational strategy, culture, and capability.

The company provides custom and off-the-shelf gamified platforms, as well as consulting services, giving them the flexibility to apply their tools to solve a range of challenges related to everything from organizational performance to cultural issues.

New Game, New Players

PentaQuest was founded in 2016 in Canberra, Australia. Their founder, Kerstin Oberprieler, discovered gamification in 2014 and implemented a gamified experience for her colleagues in order to add fun to business- and team-based activities.

“The original design was simply a ‘pen and paper’ experience. It involved a team leaderboard in the office and physical tokens and artifacts,” says James Sellers, a gamification designer at PentaQuest. “Kerstin’s colleagues loved it. Before long, there was enough demand from clients for gamification design, and PentaQuest was born.”

With a proven methodology and track record, the company earns clients through both word of mouth and extensive existing networks.
 
Yes, Gaming Is Good for You

Whether applied to employees, citizens, customers, or students, gamification promotes positive workplace culture, health, and well-being, and the practice is proving to be effective for governmental departments, schools, multinational companies, and many more entities.

Although gamifying tasks can be a fun motivational tool, PentaQuest makes it clear their core values drive success. Review these six core values to see if your team can benefit from the methodology:

1. Purpose driven 
2. Playful 
3. Player-centric 
4. Ethical 
5. Experimental
6. Open to evolution and change

If improved employee engagement is a goal for your company in 2019, look further into how PentaQuest implemented the practice to see if gamification aligns with your career and personal goals.

“PentaQuest is growing quickly, and we are now serving customers from five countries,” says Sellers. “In the coming years, we hope this number will grow significantly as we continue to provide value to thousands of organizations and teams around the world, helping them supercharge performance through a human-centered, playful approach to employee engagement.”

Many established companies are already gamifying programs for their employees. Here are just a handful of businesses enjoying practical success with gamification:

• Cisco
• Deloitte
• Microsoft
• Nike
• Spotify
• Verizon

Even human resources are successfully using gamification to drive higher employee engagement and to raise productivity. It’s also resulted in improvement in unexpected areas, such as the promotion of better diet and exercise practices among employees.

Gamification has proven to have a positive impact on employee engagement. By harnessing humans’ natural interest in playing games, participants feel more motivated to solve work-related issues, which, in turn, benefits the company.

PentaQuest won the 2018 Bronze Stevie® Award for Startup of the Year in the 2018 Stevie Awards for Women in Business.

Interested in entering the Stevie Awards for Women in Business this year?

While many think of academics as the core of education, there have been recent shifts in the fundamental way learning is viewed and approached. One of these more significant shifts came with the rise of the whole-child approach—policies and practices that move the focus from a narrowly defined set of academic standards to a concept of success that encompasses long-term developmental health.

The whole-child approach is particularly championed when it comes to early childhood education. The goal of this approach is to equip students with the skills necessary to be fully prepared not just for elementary, middle and high school but also eventually for college, fulfilling careers, healthy relationships, and successful citizenship. This is done through a more holistic and comprehensive look at all of a child’s needs, including the emotional component. It also emphasizes a collaborative approach between the child’s school, fellow students, family, and community.

Schools Embrace the Whole-Child Approach

The Malvern School, which is headquartered in Glen Mills, PA in the United States, is a private year-round preschool that serves children ages six weeks to eight years, and it serves as a prime example of the kind of learning institution that wholeheartedly embraces the underlying concept of whole-child education.

“The Malvern School always seeks to raise the bar in early childhood education,” says Kristen Waterfield, the school’s cofounder and president. “We encourage children to meet their highest potential, but that potential isn’t one-dimensional. As a teacher and a mother, I have always felt strongly about the importance of developing the physical, emotional, cognitive, and social growth of the ‘whole’ child, and this is key to our educational philosophy.”

While some detractors of the whole-child approach fear the loss of academic rigor, schools like The Malvern School demonstrate that the enhancement of emotional intelligence need not come at the expense of more traditional intellectual development.

“When my business partner, Joe Scandone, and I founded the Malvern School 20 years ago, our goal, first and foremost, was to provide exceptional programming,” says Waterfield. “And we wanted that exceptional programming delivered by forward-thinking, college-degreed educators. By starting to build this dual foundation of emotional health and academic intelligence early, we truly believe we’re setting up children for success throughout their lives.”

Parents and Caregivers Recognize Success

Parents and caregivers of the young children who attend programs like The Malvern School are pleased with the concrete, positive results. With the continuing success of its curriculum, The Malvern School, which began in 1998 with only 20 employees, now employs 580 educators and operations and business professionals over 26 locations throughout southeastern Pennsylvania, United States, and central and southern New Jersey, United States.

“Departing from the traditional model of day care or childcare programs, our schools focus on diverse programming that enables children both to learn and to feel loved,” says Waterfield. “This has fueled the school’s ability to become the largest privately owned preschool in Greater Philadelphia [Pennsylvania, United States].”

While some educational shifts may be more fad than lasting ideology, the whole-child approach only seems to grow in popularity every year as parents seek to provide their children with the best pathways to success.

“Since 1998, The Malvern School has educated more than 30,000 children—a number that continues to grow significantly,” says Waterfield. “With our steadfast focus on providing value to the community, we continue our journey to bring new educational opportunities to children and families, and we have plans to open additional schools in 2019.”

Parents, however, aren’t the only ones recognizing the significant work done by educational institutions in this sector. For her innovative work with young children, for example, Waterfield recently earned a Gold Stevie® Award in the Entrepreneur of the Year category in the Stevie Awards for Women in Business. 

To learn more about Waterfield and The Malvern School, visit MalvernSchool.com.

When Natasha Bansgopaul helped establish a financial technology firm focused on alternative investments, she knew getting clients to ditch their existing methods of evaluating funds and raising capital wasn’t going to be easy. The bigger challenge: acting as a minority change agent who also happens to be female.

“People tend to underestimate you. This is especially true in financial services and technology industries, which are trying to rally to incorporate more women leaders throughout,” says Bansgopaul. “The advantage is that I’m always able to over-deliver and to lead my team accordingly. You can perform well beyond expectations when you’re underestimated.

“The disadvantage, though, is that you always feel the need to prove yourself and to deem yourself ‘valued’ or ‘worth it’ in order to combat the perception,” the entrepreneur says. “I focus on debunking the myths and letting our deliverables speak for themselves.”

Transforming the Industry

More than four years into DarcMatter, her venture that’s based in New York, New York, United States, the cofounder and COO has proven more than a few people wrong. The firm has become a key researching and networking platform for investors and fund managers involved in alternative investments—a category that includes hedge funds, venture capital funds, and financial derivatives.

Qualified investors (typically financial advisers), institutions, and high-net-worth individuals can use DarcMatter to explore pre-vetted funds, to perform due diligence, and to purchase shares online. It’s quite a change for industry insiders who, believe it or not, still frequently use more traditional channels to share information, including fax machines and “snail mail.”

“Our mission is to enhance capital flow, transparency, and efficiency for clients by providing direct and comprehensive access to funds in the asset management industry,” says Bansgopaul, who started the business with college friend Sang Lee in 2014.

One of her main responsibilities these days is broadening the brand awareness of DarcMatter via speaking invitations in the United States and abroad in South Korea, as well as spearheading the company’s product development and blockchain integration initiatives.  Recently, the team announced the launch of “Konstellation,” the blockchain development and consulting division of DarcMatter, geared towards financial institutions with dedicated internal blockchain development teams.

Since July 2017, she’s helped grow the company’s user base by over 60 percent. Today, DarcMatter hosts information on more than 150 live fund products and has upwards of 2,900 registered investors using the platform around the globe.

Bansgopaul was honored for those accomplishments last November with a Gold StevieⓇ Award for Female Executive of the Year and a Silver for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in the Stevie Awards for Women in Business. DarcMatter also received a Bronze in the Company of the Year category.

“It was an amazing honor to be selected amid stiff competition from over 1,500 finalists from more than 30 countries,” she says. “I’m truly proud to represent the DarcMatter team.”

Interested in entering the Stevie Awards for Women in Business this year?

Paying It Forward

DarcMatter, which has offices in South Korea, China, and Ukraine, boasts a particularly diverse management team for the financial technology (fintech) industry, which is something Bansgopaul definitely takes pride in.

“As a company with a black female founder with an MBA, a Korean-American cofounder, and a Ukrainian chief technology officer, our management team comes from culturally diverse upbringings,” she says. “We tout a wealth of diverse experience from various sectors, including traditional financial services, CPG, and corporate strategy, as well as product and SAAS technology development.”

The executive is aware, however, that there’s a long way to go before women attain equal footing in her industry. According to a gender diversity report published by Mercer, women comprise 46 percent of all employees in the financial services sector but only 15 percent of leadership positions. Currently, DarcMatter has seven female employees, representing 35 percent of its total employee count. Bansgopaul hopes that number will continue to grow.

“As a female in a position of power, I am laser focused on hiring qualified female candidates. I hope to assist in their growth and development within financial technology firms, which should, in turn, help to build a new class of diverse female talent. Moving forward, they can then recruit candidates like themselves, and this positive cycle will continue,” says Bansgopaul.

Few industries are as integral to well-being as health care—and by capitalizing on the globe’s exponential technological achievements, the medical field continues to advance telehealth. Much as the Internet changed how people communicate, telehealth is disrupting the status quo of health and wellness in order to improve how people live.

What Is Telehealth?

Telehealth essentially leverages technology in order to distribute health-related services and critical health-related information. Even when a clinician is in another city, state, or even country, telehealth allows that clinician to provide advice, reminders, health monitoring services, and more to his or her patients.

The field of telehealth is not necessarily new, but with burgeoning technological advances, the applications continue to expand and to change. Here are just a few ways telehealth is pushing the medical field in an innovative, positive direction:

• Two or more doctors, regardless of location, can meet via video conference to discuss a case. (Lab results and tests can also be distributed to multiple facilities across the nation or world to ensure the proper specialists analyze the results.)
• Through remote access, a surgeon can perform robotic surgery.
• A patient can complete a physical therapy regimen from home through live feeds and digital monitoring equipment.
• Transitioning health data management online can make the process more secure, accurate, up to date, and integrated with the health care system.

Benefits of Telehealth

Even as this industry evolves, the underlying benefits remain clear:

• Increased access to health care for those living in remote or rural areas.
• Increased access for those with limited or no means of transport to a medical facility.
• Increased access to care for historically vulnerable populations, including the elderly and disabled.
• Minimized health care costs.
• Consolidation of a company or organization’s resources into a single platform (e.g., a mobile app).
• Access to live health ambassadors any time, day or night.
• Ability for working parents in the medical field to perform job tasks from home. (Many nurse call centers today are moving toward a remote nursing model.)
• A modernized health care system that prioritizes convenience, communication, and wellness.

As people continue to live longer, demands on the health care system increase, but there’s often not a correlated increase in funds for those facilities. When critical resources—namely, money and staff members—are low, telehealth can fill in many of those gaps, ensuring more people get easy, affordable access to the care they need.

Recognition of Innovation

Every year, telehealth becomes an increasingly integrated part of the medical landscape. Companies at the forefront of that innovation are receiving both recognition and support for their important work.

Continuwell, a company based in Jacksonville, Florida, United States and part of the TriageLogic Group, provides telehealth software and mobile communication solutions to U.S.-based medical centers and businesses.

“Continuwell is an innovative platform with a mobile application designed to simplify the employee well-being experience,” said CEO Dr. Charu Raheja. “We keep members engaged and informed, and we empower them to access key company resources through our easy-to-use mobile app.”

For her efforts, Dr. Raheja won the 2018 Gold Stevie® Award for Female Entrepreneur of the Year in the Business Services category of the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, and the TriageLogic Group and Continuwell took the 2018 Silver Stevie Award for the Most Innovative Company of the Year in the same category.

“This recognition is an honor to our team,” said Raheja. “By increasing our visibility, we sincerely hope we can help other companies engage with their colleagues and prioritize health and well-being.”

Mona Andrews is many things: a California, USA, resident; an entrepreneur; and the operator of a business process outsourcing firm since the early 1990s. She notes she had the flexibility to balance the demands of raising young children, but when her kids reached preschool, she noticed other moms didn’t have that same luxury.

“Either they stayed employed and missed many of the important moments of being a mother, or they dropped out of the workforce altogether,” recalls Andrews.

Many of her female friends continued working after their first child was born, she says, but when the second son or daughter came along, the financial and emotional toll became too much.

“It’s an impossible situation,” says Andrews.

With her latest venture, Stay In The Game, she attempts to eliminate the dichotomy between being a mother and having a career. The company, launched in 2017 in Los Angeles, California, United States, offers “downshifting” opportunities, where women can work part time or remotely. This allows mothers to be home with their children either all day or at least more each day. The company also works with individual employers to reintegrate a mom into the workforce after a prolonged absence.

“As the children of these women grew, I noticed a surprising phenomenon,” says Andrews. “Over and over again, I met highly educated women who previously had important careers, and now they were telling me they wanted to get back into the workforce but didn’t know how.

The most jarring realization was their lack of confidence. They had not been in the workforce for a while and felt insecure regarding their relevance, their ability to compete, and their skill levels.”

At the same time, she noticed employers were reluctant to interview any woman who had taken an extended leave. To Andrews, this seemed a regrettable waste of talent and energy.

A Changing Workforce

While society has progressively abandoned the idea of strict gender roles, women continue to sacrifice their careers for family to a much greater degree than men. A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center, for instance, found 42 percent of women reduced their work hours after the birth of a child, which compared to 28 percent of men.

Even more telling was the fact that 27 percent of women left their jobs to handle child-rearing duties, according to the Pew study. Only 10 percent of men did so.

Stay In The Game provides its services as a way for businesses to leverage the talent of experienced, skilled workers, who are often less expensive than lower-level temporary employees. Candidates work in a range of fields, from data entry and customer service to IT and accounting.

At the same time, employers can demonstrate their social responsibility by providing continuity for caregiving parents. For Andrews, the service is also a means to retain talented employees who might otherwise drop out of the workforce completely after having children.

“There will be an exponential increase in the demand employees have for remote and flexible work, and companies will be forced to change in order to successfully retain great employees,” says Andrews.

As her firm grows, she sees it as a way for more employers to manage that challenge.

“We can offer employers a solution that includes a talented, dispersed workforce,” the entrepreneur says.

Though the company is still in its infancy, Andrews says it’s not having any trouble finding female job candidates. In the case of one advertisement she placed for a remote position, she received 240 applications in just three hours.

“The demand for our service is huge,” she says.

For its innovative approach to helping skilled, professional mothers achieve greater work-life balance, Stay In The Game won two Bronze Stevie Awards at the 15th annual Stevie® Awards for Women in Business in November. It earned one for Best New Product or Service of the Year in the Business Services category and another for Start-Up of the Year.

“This has really reinforced the value of what we offer, and it shows our business concept resonates with many other people,” says Andrews.

Worldwide research shows that gender bias in the workplace is improving, but there’s still a long way to go. Although perceptions of gender roles naturally change over time, many organizations and individuals want to do their part to make current conditions as fair as possible for everyone at work.

 2A Consulting is just one example of a company doing what it can to promote equality in the workplace. The marketing agency focuses on storytelling for business, striving to blend strategic and creative efforts to create assets that captivate customers. From the top down, the leadership team at 2A Consulting puts best practices in place that help improve gender equality across the company.

Using All the Talent Available to You

Having diverse sources of talent and ideas can help a company take full advantage of significant changes happening in your market. Understanding this, Abby Breckenridge, partner at 2A Consulting, has made a point to recognize and advance women who do great work.

Two actions in particular have helped 2A Consulting nurture women as consultants and managers. The first: speaking up. Breckenridge realized that getting men and women alike to squelch gender inequality had to start with acknowledging unfair practices or mistreatment. Even a lack of information about women returning to work after pregnancy can lead to unintended bias.  

The second: being open to doing things differently. The flip side of speaking up, this best practice is all about listening and observing. Breckenridge leads by example at 2A Consulting. She shows her team how to acknowledge and accept when something isn’t working, and models a mature, collaborative path to a solution.

With advances in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, IT infrastructure, and more, companies across the globe are constantly seeking to modernize their ways of doing business. One of the best ways to ensure your company thrives during change, however, is to consider and nurture the talent at your disposal without bias. To maximize resources, a company must avoid preferential treatment and advance employees regardless of gender.

Sending the Right Message

Valuing team members has been one source of 2A Consulting’s success, while another has been the company’s approach to marketing. Many times, marketing agencies immediately jump to crafting campaigns with impactful words, but these efforts often lack broader context and, ultimately, fall flat for customers. A cohesive story, after all, is a strong framework for effective marketing.

Figuring out the best way to broadcast your core value to customers is no minor task. In competitive markets, something as simple as sending the right message can be the deciding factor in whether a customer chooses your business or someone else’s.

“We help businesses lock onto the stories they're trying to tell—whether it's for a product launch or a keynote presentation,” said Abby Breckenridge, partner at 2A Consulting. “Our consultants work with clients to formulate the message, distill it down, and then build it into assets in a way that resonates. This way, companies can make lasting connections with customers.”

As good marketers know, there’s often a large difference between what a company sells (the product) and what customers are really buying (the solution to their problem). That’s why it’s important to be as clear as possible with your messaging and to think about your audience when crafting that story.

Consider what you can do within your organization to encourage an environment that’s more inclusive, makes use of all its untapped talent, and, ultimately, brings in more successful prospects.

2A Consulting recently earned a Bronze Stevie® Award for being one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.

Much has been written about the rise of the gig economy, i.e., the hiring of workers on short-notice, short-duration contracts or freelance jobs. Part of this narrative is how noticeably different it is from the labor market models of old. In the past, people either focused on: a) the miraculous rise of start-ups based entirely on gig economy business models, such as Uber, or b) how the gig economy is, for workers, often characterized by a lack of job security, pension, health care contributions, and other employment benefits once considered standard.

Either view misses the wider picture, though.

To start, job security and benefits were never as widespread or culturally ingrained in the United States as they were in Europe. And even there, they applied only to the working population, which in the most unionized industries was predominantly, if not exclusively, male.

Not only have workforce demographics since changed, but many of the industries in question began to decline or even to die out long before the rise of the gig economy. The perks afforded to the workers declined along with them. In the United States, a blue-collar job that included both health care and pension benefits was a rare thing, even in the last few years leading up to the financial crisis.

Furthermore, the gig economy, particularly when it involves jobs conducted entirely online, has enabled competition among a wider variety of qualified service providers in a huge range of sectors.

Increased competition holds especially true for international organizations, who can now easily hire, for example, translators or legal experts to process documents. These workers can be local to the company, or they can be specialized experts halfway across the world. It simply depends on the priorities and needs of the business – but an over-looked benefit of the gig economy is its lack of dependence on a shared geography.

It might surprise you then that the gig economy also benefits domestic labor market access – particularly professional women.

Online-only work relationships inherently favor white-collar work. That’s because in the gig economy, work that involves the processing and editing of data or documents is easier. These projects can be worked on and transferred between people, even those who have never met face to face.

As a result, gig economy work favors workers with at least secondary, preferably tertiary, levels of education who can self-organize, hold themselves accountable, and who are dedicated to advancing their skills.

In fact, such online professional work largely benefits women who have historically been excluded from the workforce, both in Western countries and in the developing world. There are at least two reasons for this:

1. Women still make up the majority of stay-at-home parents in developed countries;
2. Women also account for the majority of college-level qualifications achieved in developed countries and in developing countries with reputable education systems. This trend is seen even in countries where there is no expectation of women becoming a significant part of the workforce, such as Iran or Saudi Arabia.

By working online, women who have desirable qualifications but are constrained by social or family circumstances can find gainful employment with clients who require their expertise.

Their clients might not be looking for full-time employees who receive full benefits, but neither are these workers looking for the additional constraints of regular hours and physical attendance.

Instead, a working relationship can be formed around necessities and priorities, with both parties still inherently interested in a long-term working relationship on a good-pay-for-good-work basis.

Alysha Dominico and Vicky Marrack, co-founders of the inbound marketing agency Tangible Words, explain that they discovered the virtues of a long-term but flexible working relationship thanks to their first external copywriter. Her family responsibilities necessitated she stay at home, but allowed for remote work, and this win-win relationship became the blueprint for nine more subcontractors, most of them women. This model has even gained the company independent acclaim. Tangible Words was awarded a 2018 Gold Stevie® Award in the category of Achievement in Promoting Work-Life Balance for Women in Business.

“We feel good about being an office that offers flexibility and skills development to keep parents sharp for whatever kind of lives they want to lead—now or later,” said Marrack.

“The people we employ might not otherwise have access to the labor market. Our distributed office model, virtual work, and flexible work schedules are great for them and us. Creating a positive work culture focused on our staff leading healthy lives that balanced work and life priorities equally was always mission-critical to the success of Tangible Words,” said Dominico.

“We stumbled into the work limitations – yet incredible experience and expertise parents have at that stage of life. So we decided to empower parents. Helping them create the life they choose has become a real source of pride.”

Dominico points out that it’s also a strategy other companies will need to utilize  - particularly when employee availability is low. A 2017 briefing by McKinsey Global Institute called “Technology, Jobs, and the Future of Work” documented that “Almost 75 million youth are officially unemployed. Women represent one of the largest pools of untapped labour: globally, 655 million fewer women are economically active than men.”

“You read this and compare it with other things you see, like research from RBC which urges people to start to talk about the future prediction that 2.4 million jobs will be added to the Canadian economy by 2021, and you wonder how long we can afford to not focus on prioritizing youth and women.”

Indeed RBC’s research team published in their 2018 report “Humans Wanted: How Canadian youth can thrive in the age of disruption” that  “Despite projected heavy job displacement in many sectors and occupations, the Canadian economy is expected to add 2.4 million jobs over the next four years, all of which will require this new mix of skills...…an increasing demand for foundational skills such as critical thinking, co-ordination, social perceptiveness, active listening and complex problem solving.”  

With day-to-day economic demands rapidly increasing, many households can simply no longer afford to have a stay-at-home parent. Many people, however, find childcare options either of uncertain quality or prohibitively expensive. To compound the problem, women today consistently find their earning potential exceeds that of their partners, but they are forced to choose between securing childcare they do not trust 100 percent or attempting to get by on a single salary—and foregoing their careers.

This problem is widely recognized in countries across the developed world, and many nations have state-run daycare or centers or subsidize private childcare. However, these measures continue to fall short. Even the most generous analysis of gender employment and income gaps must concede that while there is no outright discrimination, there is a persistent, discernible, and significant structural difference in employment rates and remuneration. This is almost entirely attributable to time women spend out of work because of the exclusive prioritization of childcare.

With that said, it’s evident that improving access to top-level quality childcare would have significant, indirect economic effects. As things stand, the slow but steady march toward income and employment equality will likely result in more men becoming stay-at-home parents, and the number of women almost exclusively dedicated to their careers will rise as well.

While the push toward equity is desirable, having one stay-at-home parent—of either gender—is far from the optimal outcome. It’s not ideal for the household itself or for the economy as one parent continues to all but give up a career, while the other misses out on a considerable part of family life.

The professionalization of childcare necessitates moving away from the existing model, where families secure childcare primarily based on personal, informal relationships. With no current standardized means of formalizing these relationships with service providers, such as nannies and au pairs, it’s clear that a certified, standardized, widely available service provider model would be a significant step toward optimizing the childcare situation.

Qualifications and a college-level education have traditionally only been required for high-level childcare positions. Elizabeth Malson is a single mother, entrepreneur, and founder of the Amslee Institute, which specializes in the certification of childcare professionals. She helps explain this model.

“Traditionally, nannies in the United States have been trained by other nannies and nanny agency owners through workshops because there are no government regulations or standards,” she says. “To qualify for top jobs, a nanny had to invest in an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. These options require a significant commitment to and investment in a two- or four-year college program, and because of the time and expense involved, college-level training for future childcare professionals, in many cases, is simply inaccessible.”

Through her company, based out of Sarasota, Florida, United States, Malson proposed to do something about this. A 2018 Gold Stevie® Award winner in the category of Best New Consumer Service, the Amslee Institute provides affordable online college-level classes. Despite adhering to high standards, the classes require a lower financial investment than traditional college courses, and they take no more than 12 weeks to complete. Malson acknowledges the economic necessity of two working parents in many households and adds that childcare can be made more affordable in several ways, such as by families sharing the expense of a childcare professional.

Professionalizing childcare and introducing certifications and standards can help boost workforce participation, create a thriving new market, and give parents peace of mind. Malson also points to a broader effect. Childcare professionals from all over the world aspire to come to the United States (Some even go into childcare merely for the opportunity to come to the country.) This means U.S. childcare standards will eventually be exported across the globe by the childcare professionals who return home, says Malson. Raising childcare standards in the United States, therefore, will mean raising childcare standards across the world.

 By all outward appearances, Jeanne Allert had everything going for her in the mid-2000s: a successful career as an internet consultant, an elegant home, and a sizable income. Inside, however, she remembers feeling an emptiness.

“I reached a point in my life where I said, ‘Is this all there is?’” Allert recalls in an online video.

Little did the American businesswomen know her life would forever change when she met a group of volunteers who were performing outreach to women caught up in prostitution. It was there, on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, United States, that Allert saw the magnitude of the sexual exploitation crisis—and the power of a helping hand.

One particular victim moved Allert so deeply that, in 2007, Allert decided to launch the Samaritan Women, the mid-Atlantic region’s first residential care program for females ensnared in the domestic sex trafficking industry. It meant selling her lucrative business, putting her home on the market, and dipping into her savings to buy an abandoned 23-acre estate in Baltimore, Maryland, United States.

The organization started providing around-the-clock shelter, counseling, and medical care to women and girls who had been coerced into prostitution or other forms of sexual exploitation. As a Christian-based entity, it also began fostering spiritual healing in its residents, many of whom were suffering emotional trauma as a result of their experiences on the street.

Allert says the people who work at the homes often serve as the positive role models who have been lacking in the residents’ lives.

“When we show forgiveness, grace, and compassion, the women are observing our behavior,” says Allert.

According to Shared Hope International, girls as young as 14 to 16 are among the most commonly exploited. Traffickers prey on the most vulnerable, including those who have suffered child abuse or grew up in broken homes. They often find their victims through social media platforms and internet sites, as well as at schools and local hangouts.

Traffickers then offer the girls false promises of shelter and protection; instead, these girls face a cycle of physical and emotional abuse. By one estimate, roughly 100,000 American children are exploited in this manner every year. While getting accurate data is always difficult, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime makes it clear that sex trafficking is very much a global problem.

“People in all walks of life know that freedom is a basic human right, and human trafficking is modern-day slavery,” says Linda Thomas, a spokeswoman for the Samaritan Women.

Addressing a Shortage in Care

Despite the enormity of the problem in the United States, Thomas says 17 states don’t have a single shelter program to serve this population. Another 11 states have only one residence. Allert, who earned the 2018 Silver Stevie® Award for Most Innovative Woman of the Year in the Stevie Awards for Women in Business, is trying to fill that vacuum.

She and her team opened up two more homes for trafficking victims, enabling the group to create a full continuum of care for young women. Though limits exist to how many people the organization can impact directly, it’s trying to help other nonprofits meet this need across the country.

Toward that end, the group created the National Trafficking Sheltered Alliance, which serves as a trade association for shelter programs across the country. Its goal is to improve the effectiveness of shelter care nationally through advocacy, networking, agency accreditation, and an annual conference.

Another new initiative, the Institute for Shelter Care, serves as a research, training, and equipping entity to help establish new shelter programs, to stabilize and to improve current programs, and to facilitate qualified research in order to advance national standards of care and best practices.

“Human trafficking is a problem both internationally and domestically,” says Thomas. “We have only scratched the surface of providing care and healing for victims across the world.”

There is a tech side to just about every industry, including fashion. It goes beyond purchasing a new favorite sweater on Amazon. Today, you can scroll through Instagram, click on a photo, zoom in to see a product, and buy it with one click.

AI technology is even finding its way into traditional store shopping. You can go to a store and take a picture of a shirt, pants, or a jacket—and using one of several apps, such as Kim Kardashian’s Screenshop app, you can upload the picture and find similar styles and products all over the world. There are even avatar-based apps, such as Dressing Room, that allow individuals to try on clothing virtually. When ready, you can pay for the item with Apple Pay, which is located in your smartphone’s digital wallet.

Like any industry, the bottom line drives fashion-related businesses, and technological advances are constantly challenging that bottom line. However, the data points collected from searches and purchases are narrowing the gap between product supply and demand, meaning product numbers are more accurate, and fewer materials are wasted. Data are also helping companies predict trends and provide products their customers actually like and want.

As with most business verticals, the fashion industry maintains wholesale production intermediaries. JOOR is one of those companies leading the digital wholesale charge, using analytics within the fashion vertical. Their digital platform connects buyers and sellers online, helping buyers save time and cut costs and leading sellers to better analyze the performance of their inventory.

The company’s model embraces the global shift to mobile-first access and capitalizes on the ease and convenience of streaming handheld devices. Digitizing streamlines the fashion buyer’s process, and as is typically the case when digital technology is implemented, this reduces errors and saves time. The success of JOOR was recognized with a Stevie® Award in Best New Software Product or Service Category.

JOOR was founded in 2010 and is based in New York City, New York, United States. CEO Kristin Savilia is at the helm. She came on board in March 2017 and brought with her 18 years of retail experience and over five years in e-commerce with XO Group (the parent company of popular websites The Bump, The Nest, and The Knot). Even in the hustle and bustle of a technology-driven fashion industry, Savilia—a proactive mother of four—strives for a positive work-life balance.

While she helped lead JOOR to the head of the fashion AI and VR app curve, more technological changes are on the horizon. NextWeb reports the world is ready for the Internet of Things (IoT).

“Apparel items will have digital capabilities that open communication between retailer and customer, such as NADI X, yoga pants with built-in sensors that guide users into alignment by vibrating as they move through the various yoga poses. This example and other IoT apparel items interact with the user to collect data that help retailers understand the needs and concerns of buyers, and then companies can implement solutions to create a more personalized experience.”

In this landscape, individuals will be able to interact with businesses through their yoga pants, informing the companies that made them what they liked best and least. This will allow the companies to make more of those kinds of pants or to offer improved versions, depending on feedback.

That is technology and fashion coming full circle. Try clothes on a virtual reality avatar, search AI apps for any and all styles you like, and then communicate with the product and company directly using the IoT. Companies analyze the data, and the technological personalization and product customization cycle evolves.

In the long run, this seems cost effective and efficient while reducing waste—but it remains to be seen if consumers want to wear yoga pants and other products with AI sensors. Many consumers, however, already talk to Siri (Apple) and Alexa (Amazon), so it might not be too long before this is the product norm.