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Those of you following our Microgrid Lab project (soon to be rechristened the SFIP Global Microgrid Center) know that we’re delighted to welcome Terry Mohn as Project Director. With his deep expertise and vast network of relationships, Terry is already moving the project onto an accelerated and exciting track. In particular, Terry is working with the United Nations Foundation on the U.N.’s “Sustainable Energy for All” initiative, one of the most important efforts imaginable. As described on its website:
Energy is central to nearly every major challenge, and opportunity the world faces today. Be it jobs, security, climate change, food production or increasing incomes, access to sustainable energy for all is essential for strengthening economies, protecting ecosystems and achieving equity. Read the rest of this entry »
One of SFIP’s programmatic interests, under its transdisciplinary problem-solving theme, is the idea of “artist-driven innovation.” Due to their singularity of vision, passion, and imagination, artists and designers often drive achievements in other synergistic areas to new levels that mere mortals can’t imagine (think Frank Gehry and his custom CAD software, for example).
So we’re especially pleased to announce our first artist-driven innovation project, We the People, in collaboration with Santa Fe artist Sydney Cooper and leading Santa Fe design studio Anagram. Click through to the Project Description to learn more, and join the project crowd-funding effort on United States Artists.
Having so far weathered the Great Recession (and even benefited from it in terms of being forced to think very carefully about our core mission and value), SFIP recently revised its strategy and business plan from top to bottom. Many of these changes are already reflected in the content on this site, but we want to elaborate a bit here for our community of interest. We call this SFIP 3.0 because there have been two prior iterations, but also because 2.0 already sounds so old hat these days. Onwards…
The Problem with Problems
We all know that local, national, and global communities face critical challenges in areas such as energy and climate, healthcare, public education, environmental degradation, and sustainable economic development. But despite the massive resources we devote to these problems, in many ways things are getting worse instead of better.
A new approach is needed, one that moves us from incremental tweaks to systemic transformation, and scales to address the global challenges of our time. Read the rest of this entry »
This post, by SFIP advisor Saul Kaplan, originally appeared on his blog at the Business Innovation Factory, where Saul is Chief Catalyst. BIF is also a valued SFIP institutional alliance member. Saul’s observations capture the essence of SFIP’s transdisciplinary process, and the role of the arts, design, and creative fields so well that we’re offering it here for the SFIP community:
From STEM to STEAM
I’m a sucker for any event promising an interdisciplinary experience and an opportunity to dive into the unknown between silos. I was fortunate to attend, Make it Better, a recent symposium at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) on art, design, and the future of healthcare. It delivered. I was reminded of the old Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup commercials. You got your art in my science! No, You got your science in my art! Art 
and science, two great tastes that taste good together. It amazes me in today’s always on and connected world we still have to be nudged, or for many, blasted out of our silos to experience the magic of interdisciplinary thinking and doing. The timing couldn’t have been better for a participative conversation about combining art, design, and healthcare. There is growing recognition that our US health care system is unsustainable. The imperative is to transform from our current “sick care” system to a “well care” system. We need to go from an institution-centered approach to a human-centered approach. We need to go from tweaks to transformation. Art and design can be key enablers for transforming health care. Read the rest of this entry »
President Obama’s recent State of the Union address featured “Winning the Future” as its theme, and innovation as an organizing principle. This rhetorical device was a great success in terms of framing a set of complex issues in terms that can appeal to a wide swath of the public and their elected officials, which is surely necessary to advance an urgent agenda in many of the areas he discussed (education, energy, infrastructure), and we applaud the effort on that skillful basis alone. Obama also succeeded in generating an aspirational sensibility and an appeal to self-sacrifice, both needed remedies for our current malaise. If only the progressive wing could do this better, and more often.
But the devil of real tangible achievement will most certainly be in the details, which are worth looking at carefully. So let’s ask some challenging questions. Read the rest of this entry »
In 2006, Colin Beavan decided he wanted to do something about climate change, U.S. oil consumption, and its military campaigns in the Middle East. And if that’s not systemic enough, he also decided that (as a journalist) simply writing about it was not going to do any good. Instead, in his own words, “I wanted to find a way to engage Americans who were not typically interested in politics. For this reason, I wanted to draw people in through the power of story instead of polemic.”
So he and his family lived for a year in the middle of Manhattan in such a way as to cause as little impact as possible, which yielded surprisingly popular blog posts, a book, and a documentary film. The “No Impact Man” recently summarized the lessons he learned about how (and how not) to engage people in the climate crisis, a set of learnings so creative and interesting we’ve reproduced them here: Read the rest of this entry »
Or: How Incremental Tweaks Can Frustrate True Transformation
While assimilating the remarkable insights from the BIF-6 Collaborative Innovation Summit last month, produced by our valued alliance partner the Business Innovation Factory, I had the opportunity to sit with Alan Webber, a conference presenter, at his favorite café in Santa Fe. It may be the altitude, but we seem to have interesting conversations there.
This one led to a discussion of the potentially catastrophic course society seems to be following, in areas like energy, climate, and unsustainable development; industries that know they must disrupt or be disrupted, but still can’t; and the problem of why we seem to be incapable of true transformative innovation, even when we know what we need to do, and why. This led us to Jared Diamond’s essential work “Collapse.” Those who have read it will remember the question he poses, which I paraphrase: “What could have been going through the mind of the guy who cut down the last tree on Easter Island?” Read the rest of this entry »
The value of trans-disciplinary work has been demonstrated in a number of areas, proving its capacity for driving innovation. In fact, one good definition of “creativity” is simply putting together two or more things that would ordinarily remain apart. Numerous academic centers are explicitly inter- or trans-disciplinary. Stanford, for example, is attempting to incentivize such research with a dedicated grant program; Bio-X (interdisciplinary research related to biology and medicine, including engineering, computer science, physics, chemistry, and other fields); and the d.school (for multidisciplinary innovation); note that normal academic incentives and pressures serve to compartmentalize disciplines into hyperspecialized silos. While SFIP is in the vanguard of applying trans-disciplinary techniques to practical problem solving, it is certainly not alone.
Several recent and unusual pairings bring this idea, and the general necessity of cross-sector collaboration, into sharp relief. Especially within the context of the massive and urgent changes that must be accomplished on a global scale, we may all have to learn to work with the unexpected (and even “unsuitable”) partner in order to get the job done.
For example, the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Pew Project on National Security, Energy and Climate recently published Renergizing America’s Defense, which “…details steps the armed forces are taking to address their energy use and carbon emissions. Read the rest of this entry »
As most of our local community members know, SFIP is part of a broader effort to diversify Santa Fe’s government- and tourism-based economy, and capture the city’s unique assets and attributes in a way that can propel the region into the innovation economy of the future.
Santa Fe Complex is among the more interesting and promising elements in this “innovation ecosystem,” and one with great complementary resonance for SFIP. According to its newly revamped website, “The mission of sfComplex is to create a collaborative workspace that fosters applied complexity science through interdisciplinary education, outreach, and development of innovative technologies to address real-world problems, enable social cooperation, and create economic opportunities.” Read the rest of this entry »
President Obama, in his first State of the Union address, told us that other countries are making the investments needed to seize the opportunities present in meeting the world’s grand challenges, and that the U.S. risks being left behind. He’s right.
The National Science Board’s biennial Science & Engineering Indicators suggests that as early as the 2012 edition, the U.S. will no longer lead the world in total R&D expenditures – unless corrective action is taken (graph here). And Senator Jeff Bingaman, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, recently told a Senate hearing that “…our investments in new energy technologies, and the science underlying them, have been surprisingly deficient over the last 20 years…. our national R&D investments in medicine and biotechnology, as a percentage of sales, are about 40 times greater than our research and development investments in energy.” Read the rest of this entry »
