2019: The Year in Innovation

As we close out 2019, I’m both excited about what’s to come and reflecting on what was a most memorable year of innovators and innovations. It has been 20 years since I consciously dedicated myself to exploring the applications of the leading edges of technology and science, innovation economy business models, creativity, and social movements to business and human challenges. 

Twenty-five years ago I founded my first company, a tiny consultancy focused on bringing the best of what I found “out there” in to my clients’ boardrooms, aisles, and shopping carts. I was literally raised on the shop floor of my parents businesses and amid the busy, ambitious hum of their community of entrepreneurs. They were always starting, expanding or closing enterprises, hawking new gadgets and elixirs, and always, always optimistic about what was to come. 

What they were not was always aware of the potentially exponential benefits that technology, business models and ideas from outside their respective industries could bring to their businesses. I set out to change that. And, I think, I did. I built inventory management software, contact and digital asset management systems. I made introductions, developed cooperative advertising campaigns with costs shared among complementary businesses. I crafted local and direct marketing advertising campaigns, built prototypes, displays, and eventually websites, and even designed uniforms for motorsports teams. But most of all, I enjoyed learning about the entrepreneurs and executives, the inventors and creators, the emerging technologies with their awful interfaces, and oh the information! I apologize to all of the trees who lost their lives so that I could print everything I found online on my dot matrix printer. 

Thanks in great part to an inspiring and generous community of innovators, I’m still as committed as ever to the practice of innovation, to lifelong learning, creative experimentation, and intentional application and adaptation of bold new ideas, exponential technologies, and sustainable business models (read: won’t strip the planet, will grow financial and social equity). 

Here are just a few of the innovations—and innovators’ moments—that made 2019 so memorable!

As part of the Affordable Housing Accelerator I founded and operated at Kaiser Permanente, I met an ambitious lot of entrepreneurs, architects, educators and engineers who I firmly believe are on the precipice of changing everything about the way housing is built—faster, more affordably, less dependent on current players and institutions that define the housing, real estate development and home building industries (spoiler alert: Housing First, LIHTC, incentives from government, corporates and impact investors don’t/won’t work for our current housing and homelessness crisis). 

Icon, makers of a 3D printer and proprietary LavaMix concrete that may soon enable virtually anyone to print a single-family home in 24 hours for 50 percent of local market cost. 

Blokable, modular homebuilders changing more than just the box. They’re changing the way modular is built (steel not wood), managed and owned—from finance and factory, to materials and virtual monitoring.

DUS, additive manufacturers, designers, architects and makers stretching the bounds of 3D printing through engineering and strategic partnerships to construct public spaces, art, fixtures, flooring and more. 

Auburn University’s Rural Studio, an architecture program whose work is anything but academic. Rural Studio students move into rural towns, design and build houses, public spaces, and libraries, many of them built to standards that exceed LEED and WELL and complete with custom mortgage products and lower overall costs of ownership.

Ecoplastico Ambiental, the brainchild of University of Guadalajara engineering grad Ramón Martin Espinosa Solís, builds earthquake-resistant houses made of shampoo and milk bottles and broken chairs. The 538 SF houses require little maintenance, no AC or heat, and production models cost just $18,000 USD.

I had the pleasure of being part of Culture Shift Labs’ Sports, Health, Tech & Wellness Action/Think Tank. Our Fireside Chat was moderated by brilliant health innovator and maven Dr. Asha Collins (and co-curated by equally brilliant connector Dr. Michael Penn), and provided me entrée to a smart community of black and brown entrepreneurs including Kevin Dedner whose #healthtech startup Henry Health is on a mission to improve black men’s mental health by providing culturally relevant telehealth services.

I joined one of my favorite collaborators in the world, James Beresford and his Xynteo team in Seattle where I had the pleasure of leading a systems thinking session for a cohort of global executives who lead innovation efforts at some of the world’s leading corporations. Together we explored Seattle’s homelessness and housing crisis by walking in the footsteps, following and being led by the ecosystem’s leaders, innovators, makers, residents, and anchors. I’ve met or become aware of many innovators/innovations via my Xynteo collaboration, including Trashcon, a Bengaluru, India-based startup (founded by 23 year-old Ms. Nivedha RM) that’s using its automated trash segregated, TrashBot, to literally spin trash into treasure—99.6% of waste is segregated into biodegradable and non-biodegradable components that can be used as fertilizer, biogas, fuel, oil or furniture board.

I can’t stop following NASA Challenges. One of the several companies I discovered there was Air Co. Air Co. is a lifestyle tech company that’s lightening the conversations about mission-based enterprises and clearing air by turning carbon dioxide emissions into vodka! The Brooklyn-based startup’s founders have the science and spirit industry chops (re: Yale electrochemist + Diageo Smirnoff marketer) to revolutionize a space where eco/social-driven enterprises struggle to raise money and/or are expected to create “halo” products for which the only customer is government and philanthropy. These guys opened a hip, solar-powered distillery that locally acquires CO2 (some from traditional distillers) and uses artificial photosynthesis to turn it into the first of many ethanol-based products—premium, carbon-negative vodka sold at high-end retailers and restaurants. 

Instead of eating turkey and sweet potato pie, I spent the Thanksgiving holiday in the UK with one of my favorite innovators and a member of my mastermind group, Samir Khan of the National Health Services’ Oxford Academic Health Sciences Network (AHSN). I was honored to be the closing keynote at the graduation of the AHSN’s inaugural cohort of life sciences and healthcare startups. I shared my vision of the Future of Enterprise. Khan and the NHS fielded a diverse cohort of early-stage startups but I’m most excited about the work that he and peers are doing to create a path to adoption/mainlining of startup DNA into the 71 year-old government organization. 

There were also many, many AI, CRISPR, health and corporate startups. I’ve posted about some of them and will spare you here. 

I’ll close this 2019 roundup by raising a glass (of premium carbon-negative vodka) to the brave entrepreneurs, generous connectors, resourceful mavens and persistent corporate innovators with whom I enjoyed last year’s journeys and to those who’ve signed up for new adventures in 2020. 

On tap this year are (1) a newly expanded mastermind group for corporate innovation leaders; (2) a members-only innovation lab a providing exclusive access to the products, platforms and IP of global STEAM-based startups; and (3) guided expeditions to create sustainable supply chains. Invitations coming soon. I’m excited about the the wonders to come!