Calling All Innovators: LAUNCH Seeking NextGen Kevlar

The early-bird submission deadline for the 2013 LAUNCH System Challenge is tomorrow, June 15. Ten early-bird applicants will receive advice and counsel on  how to improve their submissions for the final July 15th deadline.

All you innovators, get busy!

You can find the details about the challenge at the LAUNCH.org website. Though this is a fabric challenge, fibers can be made of data, technical strands, or bio-synthetic and/or self-healing material. Pretty spacey stuff!

LAUNCH Systems Challenge

Don’t let the word “fabric” stop you. Kevlar, a SuperMan fabric, is an invention by Stephanie Kwolek based on a chemical compound called poly-paraphenylene terephtalamide. Kevlar has amazing properties: lighter than nylon, stronger than steel, stiffer than fiberglass, more durable than leather, and doesn’t melt like polyester.

Tethered Satellite Mission

Stephanie discovered Kevlar while “playing” with polymer chains. The substance was a liquid crystalline solution with cohesive, glue-like properties — partially solid, partially liquid. She had to convince her fellow technicians to spin it as fiber, because they feared the gluey mixture would clog their machines. These fibers, which were game-changing in 1965, are regularly used for bullet-resistant vests and firefighter boots. Stephanie most likely never dreamed her discovery might be used in space. In 1992, NASA deployed a 12-mile pencil-thin Kevlar cable to secure a 1,200 pound satellite during STS-75, the U.S./Italian Tethered Satellite System (TSS-1R) mission.

Perhaps you’ve invented the nextgen Kevlar. Perhaps your technical fabric solutions can be the outer shell of a long-duration space ship. We have so many challenges living on and off the planet. Help us find new solutions to age-old problems.

We need you. Submit your innovations today!!

LAUNCH 2020 Summit: Genius

For the four LAUNCH founding partners, NASA, Nike, USAID, and State Department, LAUNCH is the Collective Genius for a Better World. Nike’s LAUNCH 2020 Summit is sheer genius!

“Our society has reached a point where its progress and event its survival depend on our ability to organize the complex and to do the unusual.” James Webb, former NASA Administrator

Last week, Nike hosted the LAUNCH 2020 Summit in “sunny” Portland  – and sunny it was, both in weather and collaborative engagement. The purpose for the Summit was two-fold: 1) introduce the new seven-year systems focus on materials, makers, and access; and 2) debut the LAUNCH 2013 Systems Challenge. Our last four challenges featured water, health, energy, and waste solutions. This year’s challenge is focused on materials – which are crucial for supporting life outside the protection Earth’s atmosphere – as well as for gravity-bound Earthlings.

LAUNCH partner Alan Hurd of State Department announces the 2013 Challenge

One of the Summit’s highlights: Hannah Jones, Nike’s VP for Sustainable Business and Innovation, led a discussion about how creative humans can rise above the limits with certified limit-busters, Astronaut Ron Garan and Gold Medalist Joan Benoit Samuelson.

Ron Garan + Joan Benoit Samuelson + Nike’s Hannah Jones discussing triumph over limits.

LAUNCH 2020 Summit video screen for Astronaut Ron Garan

LAUNCH 2020 Summit video screen for Gold Medalist Joan Benoit Samuelson

Nike also featured an innovation showcase that included past LAUNCH innovations, Gram Power, Bioneedle, DTI-r, and “Born at LAUNCH” Carbon for Water  – among other innovations such as NASA’s Solar Sail and the Nike Flyknit.

Former LAUNCH Innovation: GramPower

Former LAUNCH Innovation: Bioneedle

“Born at LAUNCH” Innovation: Carbon for Water

The AWESOME-sauce Nike team created an immersive process called the Systems Innovation Experiment (SIX) to engage our Summit participants in a decision-making atmosphere that reflects fictional, yet realistic system choices. Team investment decisions were ranked in relation to profit, environmental impact, and social capital – with collaboration as the key to system change. The moral to the story: investments we make today greatly impact our future tomorrows.

Nike’s Dave Cobban takes the stage to discuss process.

I was given the opportunity to share the “Why NASA” story on stage during the first day of the Summit. I was “set free” from a scripted speech (due to a glitch in the teleprompter), so I have no idea what I actually said.  But, here are the notes of what I planned to say. Hopefully, I hit some of these points from stage….

For NASA, we look at LAUNCH as a Collaborative Innovation Incubator. In addition to serving as an alternate means to uncover early stage technologies, LAUNCH has become a testbed for new and unexpected ways of doing business in the government. We’re incubating new methods and processes to:

1. collaborate and partner with new communities outside our normal orbit of influence,
2. innovate new solutions to a more sustainable existence off-planet, and
3. broker ideas across diverse innovation clusters of creative thinkers.

Our mission is to enable off-planet citizens to live and work in the extremely hostile environment of space. Materials are key.

Think about it:  We take the materials for human existence with us when we leave our home planet for destinations beyond Earth – whether for orbiting outposts, planetary bodies, or asteroids. These materials must be reused, recycled, and recreated into anything and everything we need to fuel a self-sustaining biosphere – which could be a spacesuit, spacecraft or space colony. As you can imagine, resupply becomes less of an option the farther we travel away from home.

In essence: we need a fully sustainable, closed-loop system to support humans (on and OFF the planet).

At NASA, our issues mirror the struggles facing earthlings – scarce, dwindling, constrained natural resources – but our problem is magnified. We have no natural resources for our journey – except what we harvest along the way.

We’ve learned [during our occupation of Earth] that our ability to thrive as humans shouldn’t harm the planet that hosts us. Sadly, we have a parasitic relationship with Earth. What we want is a symbiotic partnership where Earth thrives because we live here!

 We see LAUNCH as the rocket fuel to reach this new reality.

Process: Nike’s Santiago Gowland + NASA’s Diane Powell + USAID’s Will Schmitt + Hannah Jones

With our LAUNCH 2013 Systems Challenge, I’m most excited about our potential to discover cool, futuristic multi-purpose synthetic or bio-synthetic, smart and/or self-healing materials, and technical fabrics with novel attributes that will enable makers (humans) to have access to the materials and data needed to make better choices for better lives.

Highest praise to Nike’s Santiago Gowland and his team for providing leadership for our LAUNCH shift toward systems thinking. Nike provided systems experience and research as the foundation for our new approach. The map below is just one glimpse of the work they’ve been doing with MIT to create a better understanding of the materials value chain.

LAUNCH 2020 Systems Map

As for the LAUNCH 2020 Summit, I have one word: WOW! The Nike team envisioned, produced, and magnificently hosted a gathering of system thought leaders to engage in the materials system, share expertise, and collaborate to bring about inspired solutions to intractable problems. I’m absolutely awed by Nike’s storytelling genius and professional muscle – crucial ingredients for the Summit’s success. They’re quite brilliant at leveraging the power of spoken word and compelling visuals. They created fabulous assets the LAUNCH team can use to help tell our story going forward, and inspired us to keep pushing through the pain – collaboration is quite messy, but WELL worth it! I’m honored to be part of the LAUNCH team and have the opportunity to take part in this process.

Nike “Word Power” Tower!

Nike, you guys ROCKet!! You’ve propelled us from a high school-level sports team to Olympic contenders – EXTREME performers of the magnificent kind!

Planetary CALL to ACTION: Earthlings, we need YOUR help. One of you has a mind-blowing solution to this challenge – one that we could never have imagined without you.  Please apply! If, by chance, you’re not the one, but you know who is, please share the LAUNCH Systems Challenge with your innovation networks. We can’t succeed without you.

Sir Paul McCartney

Remember, we’re in this journey together. Help us create a planet-friendly future.

LAUNCH: Collective Genius for a Better World

[R]evolutionary Thinking: LeapFrog Logic

My LAUNCH buddy James Parr of Imaginals recommended Roger L. Martin’s book, “The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win through Integrative Thinking” for my PhD research on Social Intrapreneurship. Martin explores what he calls integrative thinking — a pattern of thinking (cognitive discipline) that relies on cultivating the opposable mind.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be determined to make them otherwise.”  – F. Scott Fitzgerald

Martin walks through a process of mapping the mind by identifying

1. stance: who you are and what you’re after,
2. tools: knocking the world into shape, and
3. experiences: where stance and tools meet the world (i.e. sensitivities and skills).

Personal knowledge is comprised of these three elements of Martin’s mind map. Breaking down the elements, an integrative thinker’s stance will recognize the gap between reality and possibilities, refusing to accept that the best options are on the table. An integrative thinker imagines a reality that doesn’t exist, and creates the models to bring it into being.

“Integrative thinkers reason about what MIGHT be — about models that don’t yet exist — to generate a creative resolution. — Martin”

I’m intrigued by his discussion of generative reasoning, which he describes in three forms of logic. The first two are best known. The third, less discussed:

1. deductive logic — the logic of what should be,
2. inductive logic –the logic of assumption that certain observations can be generally applied, and
3. abductive logic – leapfrog logic that requires creative thinking.

Charles Sanders Peirce, the founder of American Pragmatism, coined the term adductive logic, which seeks the best explanation for misfit data that doesn’t fall nicely under the current models. To take this a bit further, enough misfit data and we’re are often forced into a Thomas Kuhn paradigm shift in thinking. Martin argues that integrative thinkers (entrepreneurs/intrapreneurs) rely on generative reasoning as the only tool that can bring about creative solutions to intractable problems.

The raw material for integrative thinking — via generative reasoning — is “what does not YET exist.”

I’m extremely fortunate to work with an amazing group of integrative thinkers with the LAUNCH team, LAUNCH Council, and LAUNCH Innovators. We wrestle with how best to dislodge intractable sustainability issues that face the 7 billion+ of us who share this planet, as well as the six human living onboard the International Space Station. Stay tuned for our upcoming LAUNCH sustainability challenge focused on the materials system. We’ll convene a conversation with abductive thought leaders from industry, government, and non-profits to create new solutions and new models to bring about global paradigm shifts in the way we make and use the scarce resources — or create new options no one has yet considered.

All you leapfroggers, UNITE! Together, we can create a new reality if we use our opposable minds and abductive brainwaves.

Feast on Good: Tasty Treat

I returned home last night from two days of feasting on good — a smorgasbord of innovative social good projects and conversations with innovators who all seek new ways to make this world a better place. I had the good fortune to attend because the conference organizers asked NASA to present LAUNCH: Collective Genius for a Better World. Jim Adams, Deputy Chief Technologist for NASA, presented LAUNCH to kickoff Day One of the Feast. Several of our LAUNCH team members attended: Diane Powell/NASA, Will Schmitt/USAID, Laura Adams/NIKE, Todd Khozein/Second Muse, and Victor Friedberg/BIG.

A huge thanks to Jerri Chou, Feast organizer, for throwing such an amazing event. I met so many crazy brilliant people who have such passion to change the world. I love talking to others who care so deeply about creating social good. Two days of non-stop intellectual and emotional engagement is both exhausting and rejuvenating. I’m filled with so many new and intriguing perspectives on how to approach solution-creation.

Here are a few tweets to reflect our experience.

On Feast Day Two, we broke into groups to tackle a series of Design Challenges covering Data, Health, Poverty, Eco, and Open Design. I worked on the Open Design challenge team — “to empower a new group of people to make something that improves their physical environment.” We chose to interpret the challenge as a way to help kids know that “things” they interact with are actually made. They live in a world of products that magically appear on shelves in stores. We want them to engage in the “making of things” and be curious about how things are made. We created the concept of the “Breaker Box” where students are given a box with things inside that they can deconstruct and make something out of. We chose to create a Swiss Army Music Box with tools that could be made into musical instruments. What a fun team to work with.

The only downside to the Feast: wifi overload. With the live stream and the hacking challenge community going on at the same time, I couldn’t tweet fab tidbits of wisdom in most of Day Two and the latter half of Day One. But, that’s a good problem to have. Great demonstration of demand swamping supply.

All in all, my favorite speaker was the self-titled Evil Genius @Whurley, co-founder of Chaotic Moon Studios. He totally speaks my language. On his card: “We may not have been invited to a lot of parties in high school, but trust us — You don’t want the Prom King in charge of your mobile strategy.” Too funny.  His success formula: Instigation + Collaboration + Innovation. He defined instigation as the heart of innovation. I totally agree. He challenged us to go against the grain. If our ideas are easily accepted, they can’t be all that innovative. Collaboration comes at a cost — a balance of control vs. influence. Controlling an idea can stiffle progress. He recommended we work toward influencing an outcome vs controlling it. Well said! Here is one of my favorite quotes:

Thanks Feast! I feel recharged and ready to rush out and change the world.

And, BTW, all you feasters, submit your challenge projects to Fragile Oasis. I’m looking forward to seeing you there.

LAUNCH: Innovation Super Bowl

“Your heart, not your knowledge or skill, is your qualification for leadership.”

A guest pastor at DC Metro church last weekend made this statement above. As I listen to the LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovators share their passion for making the world a better place, I keep thinking the heart is what draws us together for the common goal of solving the intransigent problems facing humanity — like water, health, energy, and now waste.

After our first day of prep session with the innovators, I’m renewed with hope for what we can do collectively, if we join together with single purpose. Each of us on the LAUNCH team speaks the same passion language for a sustainable existence (both on and OFF this planet).

The LAUNCH forum is our Innovation Super Bowl.

We work for months to source and gather the right mix of expertise, experience, and influence for the LAUNCH Council and a balanced set of innovations to tackle complex issues. Once we get to this point in the process, we recharge off the collective genius of the minds gathered together for the forum.

Here are a few snapshots from Pasadena so far.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

LAUNCH: Collective Genius for Better World!

Stay tuned for LAUNCH: Beyond Waste

It’s finally here — LAUNCH: Beyond Waste! We’ve been working for the last six months to get to this point. We head out to Pasadena, California this week to hear from nine innovators with creative ways to create value from discarded products  – plastic bottles, human and plant waste, unused fabric, and more.

LAUNCH, for those of you who haven’t heard me talk about it before, is a social entrepreneurship enterprise that breaks new ground in public/private partnerships. We created the LAUNCH program three years ago to address large, sustainability-related challenges that no single government or commercial entity can solve alone. Our talented LAUNCH team searches for transformative innovations, which we connect with a collaborative group of thought leaders and experts which we call LAUNCH Council. LAUNCH Innovators are uniquely poised to accelerate their innovations for greater impact and scale by leveraging the advice, networks, and resources of the LAUNCH Council members and the global stage LAUNCH provides.

The ultimate goal of LAUNCH is a sustainable future for planet Earth and her citizens.

The LAUNCH: Beyond Waste forum is the fourth in a series of challenges, following Water, Health, and Energy. The LAUNCH team focused on waste as a challenge topic in order to address increasing strain on the planet’s limited resources. Global citizens, as well as explorers who leave Earth’s protection, share the need for creative solutions to the issue of waste — from designing for zero waste to revaluing existing waste from inefficient production and processes. LAUNCH: Beyond Waste addresses this global challenge.

I love the tagline from Anshu Gupta of Goonj, one of our innovators from India, who wants to transform the cash society into a trash society — meaning trash = revenue stream. Our western version: one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.

Here are the cool movie posters our team (Trish and Lilly) created to represent each innovation we’ll feature at the forum.

Attero – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

Goonj – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Innovator

Kiverdi – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Innovator

Pylantis – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste Innovator

re:char – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

RecycleMatch – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

Sanergy – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

SEaB – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

Sirum – LAUNCH: Beyond Waste innovator

Attero: Attero is India’s first low cost, efficient metal extraction technology for e-waste. With an integrated recycling and refurbishing facility and proprietary metallurgical processes (patent pending), Attero is the only end-to-end e-waste recycling company in India.

Goonj: Using urban waste streams as a powerful development resource in rural India, Goonj is dedicated to saving lives, empowering people, and ensuring dignity for the underserved poor in rural India. Through its activities, Goonj helps to create a parallel economy that is not ‘cash based’, but ‘trash based.’

Kiverdi: Kiverdi offers a proprietary bioprocess that recycles waste carbon from a number of waste streams, including syngas (from forestry residue and landfills), stranded natural gas or agricultural residue, to produce drop-in fuels, oils and custom chemicals. Kiverdi’s industrial scale bioreactor allows the company to transform biomass into high value industrial products.

Pylantis: Pylantis is a bioplastics company with a proprietary process that combines organic fillers (waste) with plant plastic resins to create high waste content injection molded products capable of withstanding temperatures up to 140C. Pylantis produces a wide variety of products that provide a commercially viable alternative to environmentally unsustainable traditional petroleum-based plastic products.

re:char: re:char’s technology allows farmers worldwide to convert their waste into biochar, a carbon-negative soil amendment to grow more food and fight climate change.

RecycleMatch: RecycleMatch is the first global on-line marketplace for recycling that connects waste generators, recyclers, and manufacturers. The RecycleMatch platform finds the ‘highest and best use’ for recyclables and ‘waste’ byproducts in the market.

Sanergy: Sanergy provides quality sanitation facilities, efficient and effective waste collection services, and proper waste treatment in the slums of Kenya.

SEaB Energy: SEaB provides companies a turn-key waste to energy product which uses micro anaerobic digestion to convert organic waste into energy on-site at the source of the waste generation where the energy can be utilized continuously.

SIRUM: SIRUM disrupts the pharmaceutical supply chain by redistributing unused, unexpired medicine that would otherwise be destroyed.

You can follow along during the forum at the NASA MindMapr page. Learn more about the forum on the NASA website.

Changing “Waste-d” Behavior

Thursday night in class, we discussed the role of government services vs. contracting out, based on Charles T. Goodsell’s article, “Six Normative Principles for the Contracting-Out Debate.” Two of my classmates work for the City of Alexandria. We discussed the decision-making rationale for City services:  refuse collection is conducted by in-house by City employees, and recycling services are contracted out to private industry.

City of Alexandria Collection Truck

During our class break, a fellow student (who manages the refuse and recycling programs for Alexandria) asked what would happen if the City of Alexandria swapped out my current City-provided garbage container for a smaller one. His point: would I recycle more, if the trash I generate is greater than the container?

City of Alexandria Recycling Bins

Interesting question. Can the size of the trash container dictate my behavior?

Next question: would I collect food and yard waste IF the City provided a third container. My answer: absoLUTEly! What a great idea! If the City of Alexandria made it easier to collect and reuse waste, I would take the time to fill the containers.

Going with his line of thinking, I asked if the City ever considered providing rain barrels to collect water runoff from neighborhood houses, as well as household compost bins. Our fellow student from the Alexandria Budget Office stepped in and told me I could go out and buy my own rain barrels and compost bins.

But, IF the City wants to change my behavior, they need to make it EASY for me to make the desired choices. Right?

Rain Barrel

I love the City of Alexandria for trying out new ways to encourage recycling! Wouldn’t it be cool if a government worker could come out to my house and attach the rain barrel to my downspouts? NOTE: I’ve held off purchasing rain barrels because I’m afraid to disconnect the downspouts from the brick exterior of my house.

I know it sounds ridiculous to send someone out to my house to install a rain barrel. But, think about it — IF they did, the City could save money currently spent in water treatment and flood mitigation from excess run-off. I would use less water provided by public utilities, if I could water my flowers and garden with rain water collected from my very own house.  (I know. I know. Some of you will see that as a waste of tax payer money. But isn’t the government in the business of bringing about the public good? Think of the possibilities, if handled well.) 

This entire conversation applies directly to our LAUNCH: Beyond Waste challenge for ten game changing innovations. Part of what we’re looking for is innovative ways to change behavior so that citizens of planet Earth create less waste, and find ways to reuse the excess capacity we have. A few simple decisions by the City of Alexandria will shape how I sort, collect, and reuse my trash. A few extra steps and they could change how I use water.

LAUNCH: Beyond Waste will be accepting proposals through May 15th. Perhaps we’ll see some intriguing behavior modification innovations, like the concepts the City of Alexandria is considering. (Hopefully, they will add rain barrel to their City-provided assets. Fingers crossed!)

LAUNCH: Time to Stop Wasting

I’m flying high today. The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy website hosted our LAUNCH: Beyond Waste blogpost authored by LAUNCH: Water Innovator and Astronaut Ron Garan: LAUNCHing Ideas for a Waste-less Tomorrow.

We’ve been refining LAUNCH over the last few years. This will be our fourth sustainability innovation forum. We’ve hosted LAUNCH: Water, LAUNCH: Health, and most recently, LAUNCH: Energy — all at the Kennedy Space Center. Now we’re moving from the east coast to the west coast. We’ll gather 35-ish thought leaders to hear and discuss ten game-changing solutions to the problem of waste at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this July.

Waste is a huge issue for humans living on the planet, as well as those who live beyond the borders of Earth. In the developed world, we live in a throw-away society. We use a product (and sadly people, sometimes) and toss it when the newest model comes along. In the developing world, citizens take discarded objects, and give them new life. My daughter bought this soda can art from a market in South Africa.

South African Art: Plane from Recycled Fanta Can

To travel in space long distances, humans must take what they need for the journey. At $10,000/lb, we need to think long and hard about the essentials we send off the planet in our rocket-propelled biospheres.

We need creative minds to help think about designing a future with zero waste, and re-think waste in creative new ways to add redundant value.

LAUNCH: Beyond Waste is accepting proposals until May 15th. Be the change we need for a better tomorrow. Apply now at  http://challenge.launch.org.

Stop wasting time! It’s time to stop wasting.  

Let’s create a future with zero waste. I’ll leave you with a little Steve Miller Band….

Time Keeps on Slipping: Steve Miller Band

LAUNCH: Culture of Collaboration

My NASA colleague Diane Powell and I spoke to the DC campus of the Chicago School of Professional Psychology about the collaborative principles of LAUNCH. LAUNCH is a public/private partnership with USAID, State Department, and NIKE. The PhD students, including my daughter Steph, are exploring ways to collaborate with international organizations in culturally sensitive ways. They wanted to learn two things from the LAUNCH experience: how does collaboration work, and how do we address international and cultural differences to get the best results.

Diane gave an overview of LAUNCH as a program. I talked about the culture of collaboration, based on our experiences creating and managing LAUNCH.

Key takeaway: Collaboration is messy. 

But well worth it, in my estimation. Anyone interested in engaging in a collaborative enterprise, of any kind, should assume a bit of craziness. To expect otherwise might lead to disappointment. In other words, we should be realistic in our expectations of fellow collaborators. After all, we humans see the world differently. And that’s ok. That’s what makes the human experience so rich…and complicated. Here are a few observations about why collaboration may require us to step outside our comfort zone.

Barriers to Collaboration:

• We don’t speak the same language — whether English, Russian, Afrikaans; rules-oriented vs. free-spirited; public sector, private industry, NGO or faith-based.
• We don’t share the same work ethic — good enough vs. perfection…or somewhere in between.
• We don’t look the same — clean cut or eclectic; round or square; purple, green, or polkadot.
• We don’t share the same values or focus — public good or profit; community, state, national interest; childhood or adult issues; male or female-oriented.
• We prefer different styles of authority — collegial, authoritarian, dictatorial.
• We often assess motives of others based on our own assumptions or experiences.

You get the picture. We all approach issues, problems, solutions from our own unique perspective. Valuing different perspectives helps foster a collaborative frame of mind.

Western solutions to the world’s problems:

The PhD students are assessing how to appropriately apply western approaches to international professional psychology. From my perspective, the “do no harm” Star Trek Prime Directive may be relevant for the discussion.

Star Trek Enterprise

Jean-Luc Picard

“The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proven again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are invariably disastrous.”—Jean-Luc Picard, Symbiosis

At our LAUNCH: Big Think, I was chatting with Deborah Alvarez-Rodriguez, CEO, Goodwill Industries San Francisco. We talked about how “helping” organizations are accused of disrupting traditional cultures and communities. Her response:

“We live in an ever-evolving cultural eco-system.”

Her point is that we can’t stop helping less fortunate individuals and communities for fear we might introduce disruption. In fact, we want to interrupt the downward spiral. The good news: new businesses grow up around change. Those who don’t change with the needs of society die off. Just look at Kodak, for example. Digital film left the company in the past.

Any change we introduce into a cultural eco-system will alter the flow. We can’t expect the world to stay the same. LAUNCH is all about disruptive innovation to bring about solutions to the world’s most intractable sustainability problems. But, in order to avoid Sociologist Robert Merton’s Law of Unintended Consequences, we need to look at downstream consequences – not just point-of-disruption solutions — to understand the full impact of any change we introduce.

Here are a few tips on how to affect positive change in a culturally sensitive way.

1. Ask – what are the issues, needs, barriers; how can we help.
2. Absorb – listen and hear objectively, remove personal filters from what we think the issues are.
3. Adapt – find creative ways to apply “our” solutions to their needs.
4. Adopt – success means the end user takes ownership, internalizes solutions.

End goal: Learn to be culturally relevant so that our innovative solutions take root in society. If we do it right, we can all…

Star Trek: Spock

…“Live Long and Prosper”
Spock

LAUNCH: Innovating the Way We Create

Upcycled waste becomes Robot Art

The amazing LAUNCH core team from NASA, USAID, State Department and NIKE is gathering in San Francisco to host a brainstorming session with thought leaders in the field of “sustainable waste” — creating less and creating more value from existing and future waste. We call this brainstorming session, LAUNCH: Big Think. Waste is a huge issue for long duration human spaceflight. Engineers at NASA are grappling with ways to creatively design closed loop systems that use waste as feedstock for additional needs. A simple example is using wasted package material to line module walls as radiation protection on orbit.

On the plane, I read the book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things” by William McDonough and Michael Braungart. What a great summary of the state of waste for the past, present, and future. Even the book is printed on “technical nutrient” (synthetic paper) rather than wood pulp or cotton fiber.

The book promotes a vision of eco-effectiveness rather than eco-efficiency. The prevailing winds of eco-efficiency rely on a notion of doing less harm. Eco-effectiveness pushes a “do NO harm” approach to how we create products and services for the future.

The authors use the ant as a model for how humans could exist on this planet –

“all the ants on the planet, taken together, have a biomass greater than that of humans. Ants have been incredibly industrious for millions of years. Yet their productiveness nourishes the plants, animals, and soil. Human industry has been in full swing for little of a century, yet it has brought about a decline in almost every ecosystem on the planet. Nature doesn’t have a design problem. People do.” — Cradle to Cradle

For the LAUNCH: Waste forum in July, we’re sifting through the innovation space around waste — reuse, remake, recycle, upcycle, net-zero, closed loop, cradle-to-cradle, etc. to determine where we should focus our search for ten innovations. From the perspective of the Cradle to Cradle authors, we should aim to eliminate all waste products by ensuring discarded products become feedstock for new valued processes.

“To eliminate the concept of waste means to design things — products, packaging, and systems — from the very beginning on the understanding that waste does not exist.” — Cradle to Cradle

I’m intrigued by the conversations we’ll have tomorrow about the waste innovation space — and hopefully a better name than LAUNCH: Waste which, let’s face it, kinda’ stinks (pun intended.)

In the end, this is the kind of world I’d love to live in — one with trees and birds and flowing streams. Stay tuned.

Mosaic forest art from DFW airport.