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Bas van Abel (Nijmegen 18-08-1977) is a Dutch social entrepreneur and designer. He is founder and former CEO of sustainable smartphone producer Fairphone and co-founder of De Clique, a circulair food start-up

Life and Career
Bas van Abel was born in Nijmegen on August 18, 1977. He studied Interaction Design at HKU University of the Arts Utrecht In 2000 he completed a degree in Electrical Engineering and Programming at Delft University of Technology.

After completing his studies, Van Abel worked for Waag Society, a Dutch nonprofit media lab developing technology, art and science for social innovation. As the foundation's creative director Van Abel founded and headed the Open Design Lab, which also includes a Fablab, a manufacturing laboratory that provides open access to industrial means of production. In 2010 Van Abel created an open-source restaurant and worked on projects that ranged from designing interactive tools supporting children with autism to helping make $50 3-D-printed prosthetic legs in Indonesia. It was in the context of his work at Waag Society that Fairphone emerged from a campaign idea that focused on raising awareness on the problem with conflict minerals in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It was from here that the idea matured and led Bas to set up the company Fairphone.

Fairphone is a Dutch sustainable smartphone manufacturer. It takes people and the planet into account as much as possible when sourcing the materials, designing and manufacturing. Under Van Abel's leadership, the company raised a total of 20 million euros in crowdfunding, was the fastest growing technology startup in Europe and scored highest in Greenpeace's Guide to Greener Electronics 2017. The company has won many international awards, including the UN Momentum for Change award. Van Abel resigned as CEO from the company in 2018. Eva Gouwens was appointed as his successor. Van Abel is still involved with Fairphone as a non-executive board member.

Van Abel won numerous prizes for his work on sustainability. In 2016 Van Abel won the German Environmental Prize from the hands of President of Germany Joachim Gauck. In 2018 he was elected an Ashoka Fellow for his work as a social entrepreneur by the Ashoka Foundation, which honoured him for creating a movement of ethical consumption while shifting the smartphone industry towards ethical production and complete transparency . In 2018 Bas van Abel received Kiel's Global Economy Prize together with Prof. Dr. Klaus Schwab and Prof. Robert Shiller, Ph.D. In December 2018 Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship awarded him as Schwab Social entrepreneur.

In 2019 Van Abel started a new circular food start-up De Clique in his home town Utrecht. The company uses electric vehicles to collect food by-products like coffee grounds, orange peels and other food waste from businesses and transforms these into new products like compost, food ingredients, cosmetics, and biomaterials. .

In 2020 Van Abel completed the "Leadership for System Change: Delivering Social Impact at Scale" program at Harvard University.

Published works
Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive. BIS Publishers, 2011, ISBN 978-90-6369-259-9.

Recognition

 * 2013 Nomination for the Rotterdam Design Award
 * 2015 Fairphone named Europe’s fastest-growing startup by The Next Web
 * 2015 Momentum of Change from the hands of Bertrand Piccard at the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris
 * 2016 German Environmental Prize from the hands of President of Germany Joachim Gauck
 * 2018 World Economy Prize by Kiel Institute for the World Economy, city of Kiel and the Chambers of Commerce and Industry Schleswig-Holstein mai
 * 2018 Winner Trigos Award for outstanding individual achievement on sustainability
 * 2018 Entrepreneur of the Year 2018 from Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship