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 Center & Smart Systems Lab

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, 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, with Resolutions in support passed by Santa Fe County and City. Read the project summary here.

Water Resources & Climate Adaptation

In collaboration with the Santa Fe Watershed Association, Santa Fe’s internationally recognized Regenesis Group, its affiliated Story of Place Institute, and other local partners, SFIP is developing a program for multi-stakeholder, community-based approaches to climate change adaptation. This will focus initially on the impacts of climate change on water resources, and seek to explore the opportunities for Santa Fe as a leader in “resource efficiency” for community and economic development. The outcome will be specific, tangible actions that demonstrate new ideas for water use (and re-use) efficiency, that can attract broad cross-sector support for implementation; and at a more general level, a change in the way we think about water and other limited resources, and the roots of sustainable development.

Portray.It (aka 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. Originally conceived under the working title We the People, Portray.It is an interactive, web-based social platform that uses individual “self-portraits” as its building blocks. Portray.It 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. Portray.It 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 design 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 citizens utilize 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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