What SDGs does your project target? What might be reasonable indicators for those SDGs?

Goal 3: Good Health and Well Being 

• Indicator 1: Mental health improvement within the office spaces that have EcoRealm partitions. This can be measured through HR surveys of employee satisfaction, and we will look for a decrease in the percentage of employees mentioning stress in their individual reports.
• Indicator 2: We hope to see significant increases in the number of job applications sent to companies that incorporate EcoRealm partitions into their workplace.

Goal 9: Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure:

• Indicator 1: The product used to place the plants will impact on how they feel—uplifting their mood— when working near this structure.
• Indicator 2: Designing a structure that is easily portable to use in different locations which allows more people to enjoy and experience the EcoRealm in their space.

Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

• Indicator 1: Improved community wellness due to a more peaceful work environment. Economic Measure? Significant increases in spending due to increase in work → increase in $$ → increase in surplus spending
• Indicator 2: Less office building turnover between companies. 

Crystallize the larger challenge your venture seeks to address, the specific problems you are targeting, and the kinds of opportunities you hope to leverage.

Our big dream would be to improve mental health in modern society. We hope to revolutionize the modern workspace with nature. 

Our venture mainly seeks to address to eliminate the box office mindless workspace that most office spaces in the country consist of. We seek to improve the work office environment by adding natural plant life in order to enhance the working environment. Not only would we improve the mental well being of the people who work around our EcoRealm, but we would also help the company by making the workers benefiting from the EcoRealm work more efficiently. These more efficient workers would lead to improving the success of the company. We hope to leverage opportunities to implement the EcoRealm into different workplaces ranging around the country, starting of course in the Lehigh Valley. 

An opportunity we are hoping to leverage in order to gain clientele is the conditions generated by the recent pandemic. The Covid pandemic has removed many people from the office and as a result, decreased productivity. The incentive for employees to  come to in person work will be increased in a positive and enriching work environment, hopefully via our EcoRealm.  We expect that company executives will be eager to implement these kinds of incentives in order to get more employees coming back into the physical workspace. We might consider targeting companies/offices with long term lease agreements or complete building ownership where not having employees work in person is a waste of resources. Under these circumstances, EcoRealm plant partitions may face lower barriers to enter the market.

Identify the two most important social, economic, and environmental bottom lines that matter to your project.

• Social: Improving emotional well being and mental health. Introducing nature as a path to better mental health. 
• Economic: Increase in employee productivity, therefore increasing success of a company and overall health of the economy. Focuses on economic development rather than just growth, which means the end goal is to raise global living standards, not just real GDP or some other singular metric. 
• Environmental:  Product that uses (hopefully) ethically sourced materials (actual frame, monitors, plants, fertilizer) and c2c design meaning that the plant structures can be refurbished and put into offices over and over with a base structure instead of contributing to landfill.
• Purpose: Revolutionizing the modern workplace by introducing nature in order to improve mental health. 

Describe ten cultural factors that might impact your project at various phases in its lifecycle.

Negative:

• Cramped, packed office spaces may be too small to fit an EcoRealm in.
• Profit orientation in United States economy, not interested in employee well-being
• Societal biases against the cleanliness of plants
• Resistance to change – people like tradition
• Overcoming pushback from potential clients who might doubt our credibility

Positive: 

• Growing awareness of the benefits received from nature 
• Shift towards mental health awareness and self care would make most companies’ HR departments concerned about the well being of their employees. 
• Greater focus on employee satisfaction and retention within companies. 
• Company emphasis on bringing employees back into the office-recent prioritization of workplace participation.  
• Dense urban communities looking to restructure existing space rather than expand

Give three examples of cultural practices that can be leveraged to address community / market problems.

1. An example of a cultural practice we could use to our advantage is the idea of having a typical nine to five job in which employees go into the office to work. This would benefit EcoRealm as it would support the idea of people going into work instead of the shift of working from home. 
2. Many corporations use cubicles, which separate employees and imply that work should be done solo. Changing this cultural practice with the implementation of plant partitions surrounding multiple desks might encourage employees to collaborate more.
3. Changing the dialogue around mental health and work going against each other. Implementing EcoRealms that support mental health at work and start a positive relationship between the two.