SFIP focuses on real-world projects, with minimum overhead and administration. We also convene workshops in support of practical objectives, and disseminate information to our wider community of interest, while building an innovation knowledge base and platform for all participants.

Our current projects in active development illustrate key facets of SFIP’s approach, and address such critical areas as energy, water, health, and community cohesion. They include:

Global Microgrid & Smart Systems Center

This partnership with the Sustainable Technologies Center at Santa Fe Community College is designed to create a research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) laboratory for community scale (or “microgrid”) energy infrastructure, eventually branching out into telecommunications, water, traffic, emergency response, and integrated “smart systems” design. Technology, finance, regulation, user-centered design, testing and certification, and engineering will all be combined under the “Global Microgrid Center” brand, with a workforce training and economic development component. The project has been endorsed by the New Mexico Federal congressional delegation, and the Santa Fe Regional Planning Authority’s Energy Task Force. Read the project summary here.

Water Resources Initiative

In collaboration with the Santa Fe Watershed Association, Santa Fe’s internationally recognized Regenesis Group, and its affiliated Story of Place Institute, SFIP is designing a workshop, events, and an ongoing program for transdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approaches to water resources. This will emphasize the impacts of climate change, and seek to catalyze a paradigmatic shift in how communities think about, value, and use water. Experts in culture, science, policy, consumer behavior, and the private and technology sectors will participate, with a community outreach and education component and a whole-systems approach. Read the concept statement here.

We the People 

SFIP is working with artist Sydney Cooper to produce its inaugural “artist-driven innovation” project, in association with Santa Fe design studio Anagram. We the People is an interactive, web-based social platform that uses individual “self-portraits” as its building blocks. WTP redefines the act of self-portraiture for the digital age, connecting individual participants in real time to form a broad and continually shifting community of convergent interests. WTP combines art, psychology, sociology, and technology, with applications in fields ranging from the arts to education to science and social services, and will itself become essential infrastructure for SFIP’s community-scale laboratories.

The project’s initial phase has been successfully funded via United States Artists, a leading micro-philanthropy platform (read the project description and view the project video there), and work has commenced on  the Phase I model and demonstration of the platform.

Community Wellness Networks 

This project represents a new approach to behavioral disease,  utilizing telehealth, cybermedicine, and integrated health and wellness practices. By combining new paradigms in behaviors and habits, social networking, data collection and analytics, mobile applications, community structure and resources, provider access and economics, telehealth architecture and infrastructure, and other salient aspects of an integrated next-generation health and wellness system, SFIP seeks to implement a pilot project in a rural or reservation community. This will position SFIP and New Mexico as a testbed and laboratory for inventing the future of behavioral disease prevention and well being at the community level. Read the concept statement here.

Applied Solutions Coalition

ASC is comprised of a national network of counties and local governments with a vision of creating and implementing a federally funded program to accelerate change in three areas vital to national security: energy innovation, economic growth and greenhouse gas reductions.  SFIP is an Associate organization, co-sponsor, and co-organizer of the Coalition.

Code Green Energy Innovation Lab 

SFIP will partner with the Business Innovation Factory to create a real world laboratory to accelerate the development of new alternative energy and energy conservation solutions for the home. The Code Green Energy Innovation Lab will include a network of homes and provide stakeholders with a better understanding of how citizensutilize and manage energy in the home, and within this real world environment, develop and test new solutions, services, and business models that increase energy conservation, advance the use of alternative energy solutions and decrease the country’s overall energy costs. Read the project brief here.

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