The PopTech Blog

Last week, PopTech convened a PopTech Lab at the Joseph B. Martin Conference Center in the New Research Building of Harvard Medical School in Boston. The three day PopTech Ecomaterials Innovation Lab kicked off our long-term commitment to fostering breakthroughs in next-generation, ‘ultra-green’ ecological materials and industrial processes, and discerning new pathways to accelerating their widespread adoption.

PopTech Concierge Keryn Gottshalk greets Lab participant Anil Netravali, Professor of Fiber Science, Cornell College of Human Ecology. Photography by John Santerre.

PopTech Labs are a yearlong, open, collaborative investigation of a critical area of disruptive innovation in a domain of vital importance to business, society and the planet, such as water, energy, materials and health. Each PopTech Lab harnesses our ability to bring together a network of innovators and decision-makers, brilliant and unconventional, to explore new ideas and identify areas for collaboration in a crucial field and to find new ways to accelerate change. We rigorously map the issues, challenges and opportunities around a specific area of future change, and identify new incentives to unlock further innovation. The resulting recommendations are used to guide further development and are shared with the larger PopTech community and the world at the following year’s conference.

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Lab participants going through an introductory exercise led by creative guru Peter Durand. Photography by John Santerre.

The Ecomaterials Innovation Lab brought together a network of eminent and emerging leaders in material science, sustainability, corporate leadership, design, academia, and policy circles. We began the program focused on getting to know one another and exploring the current landscape, system conditions and impediments surrounding the adoption of ecological materials.

Editor’s note: Kurt Andersen, best-selling author and host of the radio program Studio 360, has turned his unflagging curiosity to the current economic crisis. He believes it is an opportunity to get the nation back on track. Part of the answer, Kurt suggests, lies in reconnecting to the amateur spirit that first helped create America. Regular contributor Marcia Stepanek spoke to 2009 PopTech speaker Kurt Anderson, whose talk we release today.

Radio host Kurt Andersen wrote in Reset, his 2009 book about America’s uncertain future, that the last 25 years of American life have been years in which Americans have been guilty of magical thinking – living too large, defining success as more of everything, instantly, and behaving, more or less, like spoiled children oblivious of their impact on the world. [“We (Baby Boomers) took Peter Pan too seriously; we took Bob Dylan’s lyrics too seriously,” Andersen told PopTech conferees last October in Camden (see podcast, below). “We committed to never growing up and we didn’t.” The 1980s – until the 2008 financial meltdown — “just kept going, and kept going, and kept going,” Andersen said.]

We are now, Andersen says, in a “reset moment” that presents a great opportunity “for getting ourselves and our nation back on track.” Sure, America has always moved back and forth between economic booms and busts and between the left and right politically. But this time is different, he says. “It’s a time when all of these cycles are shifting dramatically and simultaneously; when complacency is forced to end; when outdated structures are being inevitably and necessarily challenged, and when change is rapid and difficult to predict.”

Since speaking to PopTech and writing Reset in the thick of the 2008 financial meltdown, how does Andersen think the nation is faring so far in reset mode? I caught up with Andersen last week; what follows is an edited transcript of our conversation:

On last fall’s PopTech stage, you declared the 1980s era of hyper-excess to finally be over; indeed, some nine months later, here were are, still cleaning up after ourselves. Just today, President Obama signed into law the most sweeping financial overhaul since the Great Depression; BP oil spill compensation czar Kenneth Feinberg just told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that not everybody who files a claim against the oil company will be compensated for their losses. Are we, as a nation, getting on with setting a new course for ourselves, or do we still need to hit bottom – to fail even bigger – in order to bring about large-scale, mass reinvention?

ANDERSEN: It’s a good question. Having created this “reset” prism through which I now look at the news, I sort of ask myself that question every day or every week. Some days or weeks, I go, ‘Oh well, we are moving forward and actually are reconfiguring our ways of thinking about life and business in encouraging and heartening ways.’ And sometimes, I think ‘Ah, well maybe not so much.’ I guess I think that I’m more hopeful than not. I think that a couple or three years hence, we’ll look back and say, ‘You know? We didn’t shift 180 degrees and become a different place, but the idea that there is a role for shrewd, effective forms of regulation, for instance, has returned.’ There is now the idea out there that maximizing how much we earn is not synonymous with personal contentment. Those things have changed. What hasn’t changed since I started writing about this is that, I guess by now, I thought we might be ready for more of an ideological flux than we are seeing. I’m not one of those people who believe that the country is as brutally and rigidly and ferociously divided between left and right and all of that, as it sometimes seems. But I guess I was hopeful that out of the terror and flux of the financial meltdown, more people in positions of leadership and power in Washington and elsewhere would begin to abandon their old, tired, auto-pilot talking points. And that hasn’t happened as much as I would have liked. In fact, I find that the most shocking thing, I guess, is the absolute, party line-ness that still exists on things like financial reform and most other of the big pieces of legislation now working their way through the sausage factory.

Of course, it’s not the worst of times nor the best of times in Washington, but there you have some version of health care reform that may or may not do what you want it to do, and you have now some version of financial reform that may or may not do good or bad. So things are moving forward but it’s all still somewhat ambiguous. I try to be even-handed, and I don’t consider myself a party line Democrat, but when I see 39 of 40 Republicans and the Republican establishment simply refusing to play, that doesn’t seem like what ought to be happening if the reset were proceeding as one hoped that it would.

Happenings:

• Earlier this week we released a talk by Braddock, Pennsylvania Mayor John Fetterman. In 2009 John shared his ambitious plans to revive Braddock (a town that has lost ninety percent of its buildings and most of its population) using measures that include repurposing abandoned lots and fostering numerous arts and community initiatives.

• To complement our video release, we caught up with John to find out the latest news from Braddock. Postive developments include the building of a brand new mixed use facility, a grant from Department of Labor for a jobs training program and a partnership with the iconic denim company Levis.

• Interactive media artist and 2009 PopTech speaker, Zach Lieberman has been named one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business of 2010. Zach’s recent projects include an open-source eye-tracking system that allows disabled artists to draw using their eyes, and a performance that includes drawn sketches that react to a visitor’s touch.

• What we’re reading: How Do You Teach Social Good? by Jennifer Aaker and Andy Smith from GOOD.

• We were excited to find out that the video hosting site Vimeo has added Creative Commons licensing options to the site. We release our talks under an Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license so this announcement is music to our ears.

• We discovered that Maine-based Partners for World Health recovers useful medical supplies that U.S. hospitals must discard due to government regulations, and distributes them to organizations and people around the world who have great need.

• Failure quote of the week: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” -Winston Churchill

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Editor’s note: Today we are releasing Braddock, PA Mayor John Fetterman’s 2009 PopTech talk. Braddock has lost ninety percent of its buildings, yet John is fighting for the town’s future. His ambitious plans include repurposing abandoned lots and fostering numerous arts and community initiatives.

Image courtesy of shooting brooklyn

Just days before speaking at PopTech, John was shocked to learn that he was on the cover of The Atlantic; that same week he learned that the hospital, Braddock’s biggest employer, was shutting down, which was devastating news to both him and the community.

Yesterday, we caught up with John and asked him about the latest news from Braddock. Here’s an edited version of what he told us:

When we were at PopTech last fall, we were staring down the barrel of a gun. But over the last year, two great things have happened.

First, while we’re about to lose our hospital, in its place we’ll be getting a brand new mixed use facility. It’s a 29 million dollar development that will include a new health clinic and a county-wide culinary training program where the Community College of Allegheny County will house its training program for all of Allegheny county. The facility will provide housing for the college, and the culinary program will support a new restaurant. The culinary arts training program will have a profound impact on the community on a cultural and an economic level. Now when a 19-year old comes to me looking for a job, I have a place to send him.

Additionally, we’ve received a grant from Department of Labor for a jobs training program where locals can learn the trade of deep salvage. (This includes weatherization, environmentally sound land reuse and storm water management and demolishing buildings so that the materials can be reused.) When we lost the hospital, I’d say it was like we went minus 100; this new facility is like adding back 85. Given where we were, this is a home run. Clearly there are still huge challenges, but things are definitely heading in the right direction.

Image of Braddock Farms courtesy of Kristen Taylor

The second important thing that has happened is our partnership with Levis. This two-year partnership will help us fix up the Braddock Community Center. The recent Levis ad campaign features all local people as models with 100% of the benefit coming back to the community. How many other communities have their residents featured by an iconic brand like Levis?

Oh, and there’s a third big thing that happened since PopTech. My son’s walking around like a champion.

Watch John speak at PopTech 2009 on reviving Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Happenings:

• This week we were excited to release a talk by Jay Rogers on revolutionizing the automobile industry. In 2009 he talked to the PopTech audience about how he believes that making car production local – and personal – holds the key to fostering a sustainable car culture that also tackles our dependence on oil.

• In addition to the video release, we caught up with Jay to find out more about designing cars geographically, but also psycho-geographically. He explained how this design local philosophy has sparked unexpected breakthroughs.

• In PopTech speaker news, we’re excited to find out that 2009 Speaker Aydogan Ozcan’s cellphone microscope built to detect infectious diseases is currently in field trials.

• The sex ed entrepreneur who trades bananas for broadband is none other than 2009 PopTech Social Innovation Fellow Deb Levine.

• PopTech intern Raquel Brown caught up with 2009 Social Innovation Fellow Eben Bayer about Ecovative Design’s recent partnership with Steelcase.

• This week 2008 speaker Clay Shirky explains in an interview about his new book why he believes that “No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.”

• Elle Magazine is auctioning off a variety of chic, sustainable bags that can not only charge your phone, but also benefit the Portable Light Project, an initiative of the PopTech Accelerator.

• Failure quote of the week: “So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might have never found the determination to succeed in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged.” – J.K Rowling

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