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. Energy, the environment, the economy and security are inextricably linked. That is why the Department of Defense and the military services are stepping forward not only to understand these challenges, but also to demonstrate leadership in responding to them.  As the largest government user of energy, the department has a keen appreciation of the ways energy innovation can enhance operational effectiveness, bolster national competitiveness and increase energy security, all while saving lives and money and reducing the U.S. carbon boot print.”

The military has also been engaged by The Nature Conservancy via their land conservation partnership with the Department of Defense, stating that “…more threatened and endangered species live on military bases across the United States than on land managed by the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, Fish and Wildlife Service or the Park Service…. the development that is creeping up on  military installations around the country threatens both military training activities and species. That’s why The Nature Conservancy is creating partnerships with the U.S. Department of Defense to conserve hundreds of thousands of acres of these important habitats while also ensuring military preparedness. The Conservancy is working with the DOD at more than two dozen bases across the country to create protected buffer zones.”

Management Consulting stalwart Booz Allen Hamilton published a book some time ago that has only gained in relevance since. In Megacommunities: How Leaders of Government, Business and Non-Profits Can Tackle Today’s Global Challenges Together, “Experts show how leaders in business, government, and civil society can reach across national and sector divisions, forming collaborative “megacommunities” that are directed toward a common goal.

“A hurricane strikes a city; global warming threatens the environment; and a disease resists a cure—such problems are too large for any one authority to solve alone. Our increasingly globalized and interconnected world calls for a new type of tri-sector leadership in which business, government and nonprofits work together in a state of permanent negotiation. To be effective, tomorrow’s leaders will need to reach across national and sector divisions to form a collaborative ‘megacommunity.’ “

Finally, it’s cool to read that insurance giant Swiss Re and leading NGO Oxfam America have launched a joint risk micro-finance management initiative for farmers in Ethiopia: “The collaboration is aimed at helping communities most vulnerable to climate variability and change. The project focuses on an innovative pilot project to introduce weather insurance for a staple cereal crop in the village of Adi Ha, Tigray Regional State, Ethiopia. Drought-related risks are a primary concern throughout Ethiopia where 85% of the population is dependent on smallholder, rain-fed agriculture. The pilot will adopt a holistic approach to risk management, examining the suitability of weather insurance and risk reduction measures such as seasonal forecasting and improved agricultural practices. The efforts will be funded by Swiss Re and Oxfam America, with primary technical support being provided by the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University.”

We’ll be seeing more of these unlikely partnerships, and we’ll need even more. Find the least likely collaborator you can think of, and take them out to lunch.  You never know when you’ll find yourself in bed with a stranger…

As many will have already read or heard, Google has announced a program under which it will install (at no charge) gigabit capacity fiber-optic telecommunications infrastructure in a few select communities, nationwide. This will be an open-architecture system, allowing any and all ISPs to utilize the bandwidth, encouraging experimentation and competition, and reducing costs, to the benefit of the consumer.

This level of telecom capacity will be essential to SFIP’s operations, to the ability of all of Santa Fe’s outstanding innovation centers to collaborate, and to connect with the fuller outside community of resources and participants.

It will also serve as essential infrastructure for economic development and equity for the entire Santa Fe  community; quality of life enhancements in education, medical care, emergency services, and information and entertainment; and the City’s ability to attract and retain young, smart, and talented people along with leading institutions.

City staff will be leading the charge in preparing the formal application, and they deserve our appreciation and support.  Here’s how to show it, easy as 1, 2, 3:

First, go to the Google site, click on the “Nominate your community” button, and complete the fields.  Make as compelling a case as you can, based on the factors described above (in your own words), or any others you feel are salient.

Second, join the Facebook group, where you’ll be able to keep current, share information, ask questions, and show a consolidated voice of community support and interest.

Third, forward this action request to your professional and personal networks in Santa Fe.  Let’s show Google the highest per capita level of engagement of any city in the country!

More information from the Google site follows.

Think Big with a Gig!

Google Fiber for Communities

From the Google fiber project home page:

Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone. We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Our goal is to experiment with new ways to help make Internet access better, and faster for everyone. Here are some specific things that we have in mind:

Next generation apps: We want to see what developers and users can do with ultra high-speeds, whether it’s creating new bandwidth-intensive “killer apps” and services, or other uses we can’t yet imagine.

New deployment techniques: We’ll test new ways to build fiber networks; to help inform, and support deployments elsewhere, we’ll share key lessons learned with the world.

Openness and choice: We’ll operate an “open access” network, giving users the choice of multiple service providers. And consistent with our past advocacy, we’ll manage our network in an open, non-discriminatory, and transparent way.

Like our WiFi network in Mountain View, the purpose of this project is to experiment and learn. Network providers are making real progress to expand and improve high-speed Internet access, but there’s still more to be done. We don’t think we have all the answers – but through our trial, we hope to make a meaningful contribution to the shared goal of delivering faster and better Internet for everyone.

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.”  Like SFIP, sfX  follows a trans-disciplinary paradigm, and is particularly interested in the intersections of technology and art.

After nearly two years of steady growth and development in its projects and community events and programs, several recent accomplishments have advanced sfX and local the ecosytem substantially.  New Board President Ed Angel is the former chairman of the Computer Science Dept. at UNM, and the Founding Director of ARTS Lab there; and new Executive Director Fred Seibel led the consulting division at BIOS Group, a for-profit complexity science spinout from the Santa Fe Institute. With a new contract from the U.S. Army Logistics Innovation Agency, and renewed funding from the City of Santa Fe’s Economic Development Dept., the Complex seems to be on its way to great things.

SFIP congratulates all concerned, and looks forward to close and fruitful collaborations with sfX to advance the innovation ecosystem, and produce some excellent solutions to pressing and complex problems.

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.”

These weaknesses in the R&D base are being compounded by ineffective commercialization pathways. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke recently announced the creation of the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation Policy, with a focus on accelerating commercialization, saying the process as it stands is “broken.”

All of this is critically important for our national innovation capacity, and thus our competitive position. But in citing Germany and China (not coincidentally the world’s two largest exporters) and their  R&D and manufacturing prowess, Obama overlooked what may be our strongest domestic competitive asset: creative innovation, beyond science, technology, engineering, and even product design (all areas in which China is on track to excel, as articulated by Martin Jacques in his masterful When China Rules the World).

Here, we find leadership in the European Union. EUROPA, the European Year of Creativity and Innovation 2009, aimed “…to raise awareness of the importance of creativity and innovation for personal, social and economic development; to disseminate good practices; to stimulate education and research, and to promote policy debate on related issues.” A stellar group called the European Ambassadors for Creativity and Innovation, representing the arts, sciences, social, and policy sectors, has issued a Manifesto stating in part: “The world is moving to a new rhythm. To be at the forefront of this new world, Europe needs to become more creative and innovative.” And the European Institute of Innovation &  Technology is envisioned as “…a key driver of sustainable European growth and competitiveness through the stimulation of world-leading innovations with a positive impact on economy and society.”

This is a classic whole-systems problem, on a truly global scale, and one that demands a comprehensive and holistic solution: R&D, education, commercialization, creativity, design, innovation. It’s a big strategy, but one that’s needed to win first place.

Bruce Nussbaum from Business Week completed a tour of Asia, impressed everywhere he visited with the attention being paid to design as a critical innovation element at all levels (including national policy), leading to what he called “Designomics” in his speech to the Design Korea 2009 International Conference: “The global economy is emerging from the Great Recession… with a very different shape, a very different trajectory and a very different set of growth engines.  Design, with a capital “D” is also emerging from the recent crisis, with a very different form and function. A design-based business model and a design-based economy provide the best new opportunities for creating value, growth, revenues, profits, jobs and wealth for the decades ahead.”

A new book entitled When China Rules the World: the End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, by Martin Jacques, is profound, serious, and convincing (and, if that’s not scary enough, according to Nussbaum China gets innovation and design). Meanwhile, down under, Australia’s Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (check that title again, it’s important) has published Powering Ideas: An Innovation Agenda for the 21st Century(pdf here): “Tough times demand creative solutions…. Innovation is not an abstraction. Nor is it an end in itself. It is how we make a better Australia, and contribute to making a better world — a prosperous, fair and decent world, in which everyone has the chance of a fulfilling life.” Well said, Minister Carr.

There are themes emerging from these voices, even if the melody is not yet clear. We at SFIP greet the challenges of a new year, a new decade, and a new era reaffirmed in our intention to support the development of a genuine, forward looking, national innovation strategy; and we greet the attendant opportunities with the initial efforts of the Santa Fe Innovation Park as a national innovation center, pioneering this strategy’s design and implementation.

Happy New Year.

However, ASC and its federal experts fully intend to continue seeking funding for the partnershp’s projects, including SFIP’s energy program as previously detailed.  Stay tuned for more information.

SFIP and its energy/climate program have been invited by the Applied Solutions Coalition (ASC) to join in a multi-partner grant application to DOE, through the department’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant program under the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA). Sonoma County, California will act as the lead applicant, along with partners Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico; Story County, Iowa; Buncombe County Schools, North Carolina;  Sonoma Mountain Village; Applied Solutions Coalition; and SFIP. The total request among all partners is approximately $5 million.

In its role as an “applied solutions laboratory,” SFIP will support the Coalition and its members with innovative approaches to their goal of implementing community-scale energy, infrastructure, and economic initiatives for a low-carbon regime, including transporation, the built environment, and land use. If funded, SFIP’s $500,000 request will sustain its energy program for the three-year grant period, with several specific projects to be advanced. These include the enhancement of the CLEAR model with Los Alamos National Laboratory for the Community Action Platform project; and the Code Green Energy Innovation Lab with the Business Innovation Factory. The strategy is to work with  ASC to deploy new innovations through its local government members, and from there, to scale nationally. A decision is expected from DOE in March of 2010.

As the entire “design for social change” movement gathers momentum and matures, we hope to see more organizational infrastructure emerge (and this is an area of keen interest to SFIP). One of the outcomes of the Aspen event was a proposal for New Design, a soft structure linking interested design firms to philanthropic funders and  social challenges, which may be a step in the right direction. As one summit participant oberserved: “…there’s only so much you can accomplish in three days….” What if this was one part of an “Appropriate Solutions Laboratory” @ SFIP?

HOK, one of the world’s largest architectural firms… formed an exclusive alliance with the Biomimicry Guild, a Montana-based consulting organization that pairs consulting biologists with designers, seating architects and ecologists together at the drawing table.

http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/09/architecture-imitates-life