John Elkington

Our last visit is to LA’s Cleantech Incubator, or LACI, where we are taken around by Michael Swords. Immensely impressive hive of innovation and entrepreneurial activity.

Interestingly, Joel Makower, on our first evening in San Francisco, noted that efforts had been made to turn sustainability and clean tech into a Venn diagram, or movement – but not always successfully. LACI is testament to California’s ambition to combine the two – and transform the state’s economy in the process.

By way of  background, Wikipedia notes: “LACI’s Strategic Imperative is to move “the country off of its dependence on foreign fuels … California has already put its stake in the ground with AB 32, requiring all utilities to get 33% of their energy from renewable sources by 2020. And Los Angeles is ahead of every major city by achieving almost 20% of its energy from renewable resources by 2010. The new strategic imperative is to focus the private and public sectors on the processes and technologies regarding the sustainable consumption of our natural resources.”

We were told that the site had previously been home to a brothel, while stunning photographs from the US Library of Congress showed women, more recently, in a range of industrial (particularly aerospace-related) activities and poses, including some from the Rosie the Riveter era.

Great to see sustainability up in lights, or at least as writing on the walls. And delighted to find LACI is directly linked to efforts to clean up the nearby LA River.

LACI is a test-bed for solar and other forms of energy, for electric car charing technology, and for technologies like light pipes or tubes. Huge numbers of 3D printers and even more exotic machines. Such a welcome contrast to the era symbolised by the nodding donkeys we passed, nodding, on the way in.

Then back to Marina del Rey once again, where we are to be picked up by a colleague of Ingvild’s in a rented Camaro, to go to a restaurant on Venice Beach, a few minutes away. A taste of the old, muscle car California, though after this trip I am even more confident that a very different future is bubbling under.

As William Gibson, long one of my favourite science fiction authors, has said: “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed.” Yet, we might say. And in the past 10 days we have been privileged to see some of the places where it is evolving at an increasingly exponential rate.

It’s around 11 years since an X Prize Foundation team came to see me at SustainAbility’s London offices in Bedford Row. That was around the Ansari X Prize time. Have been fascinated by their approach and activities ever since – and Peter Diamandis’s books Abundance and Bold are virtually set texts at Volans.

Serendipitously, we came across Paul Bunje (who is pivotal on the energy and environmental sides of their work) no less than three times in the recent past, and he kindly offered the keys not only to the Foundation, but also to Singularity U and organisations like IndieBio (both covered in earlier posts).

He also engineered it that we could sit in on a filmed seminar Peter Diamandis – who I talked to, of all places, in the restroom this morning – was doing for Success Magazine. Then we had mind-boggling conversations with the new CEO, Marcus Shingles, with Joel Carnes (who runs the Prizes) and with Paul.

It will take a while to process what we learned, and continue to learn, but with only one more visit to do – to the LA Cleantech Incubator, introduced to us by Paul – I have to say that this trip has exceeded my expectations by the proverbial country mile.

No sooner had we landed at LAX and dropped our bags off at the Sheraton hotel in Marina del Rey than we were headed off to UCLA, to interview and film Adam Dorr at the Luskin School of Public Affairs on the subject of his recent essay, Environmentalism & Technological Denialism. Great conversation – and we will post the filmed interview on the impending Breakthrough Innovation website we’re working on with the UN Global Compact.

 

Recommended by Paul Bunje of the X Prize Foundation, I had only read of Planet Labs – but after visiting, am stunned I didn’t know more. Their motto: ‘Using Space to Help Life on Earth.’ We met one of the founders, Robbie Schlinger – and I came away totally sold on what they are doing.

Reminded me of the project I did for WRI on space and information technologies ways back in the 1980s, which resulted in a report called The Shrinking Planet.

Robbie had spent 9 years at NASA, where he helped build the Small Spacecraft Office at NASA Ames and was Capture Manager for the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). He later served as NASA’s Open Government Representative to the White House and as Chief of Staff for the Office of the Chief Technologist at NASA.

Love the spirit of their approach: “We care deeply about creating positive change and commercial value. At Planet, ethics are at the foundation of everything we do. We have fun, love space and are committed to transparency for the planet, for our company, and for our customers and partners. Our philosophy is to move fast: design, build, learn, repeat.”

Their Dove satellites fly in the face of conventional space industry wisdom. “They’re not works of arts, Ferraris,” is the way Robbie explained it. Instead, they’re tiny, are sent up in considerable numbers, or “flocks,” and can be programmed to operate like compound eyes in space.

Then on to RBS, or the Royal Bank of Scotland, to see their man in the Valley, John Stewart. They’re scouting, too, but they’ve put down strong roots. Their aim: :”To help customers solve problems they don’t yet even know they have.” 99.9% of Californians in the business are “nuts,” he suggested, but the result can be astonishing breakthroughs. One of his interests: quantum computing.

His aim is to make all of this relevant to someone on a dark, rainy morning in Bradford, without a cup of coffee in their hand or a small dog at their heel.

Then the Breakthrough scouting team split up for the first time, with Ingvild (Sörensen) and Sam (Lakha) making off to Facebook, while I went to see Emma Stewart at Autodesk, where she is Head of Sustainability Solutions. She is also involved in a new initiative designed to operationalise the triple bottom line, Impact Infrastructure.

The background: Impact Infrastructure, Inc. was founded in March 2012 and has offices in Manhattan and in Toronto’s Annex at the Centre for Social Innovation. The company’s primary goal is to create a standardized suite of business case analysis tools to promote the development of more sustainable and resilient communities. They talk in terms of “Sustainable Return on Investment” analysis (or SROI).

Then across to the Caltrain station to catch a train to Menlo Park, for a serendipitous dinner at a Turkish restaurant with the reconvened scouts, and Janine Benyus, Beth Rattner and Courtney Morehouse of Biomimicry 3.8 and Biomimicry Institute (where I’m on the Board, as is Stefan Heck, mentioned in an earlier post in this series). They had just been to see Google X, or X as I think they now call themselves.

We were also joined by Richard Northcote and his colleague Alice from Covestro, who are working on the next leg of the Solar Impulse‘s flight – this time from Hawaii to San Francisco. We are working with Richard and Covestro on the con kept of carbon productivity. The evening fairly flew, particularly when I switched us to the Turkish wine.

Wonderful people – and a sense of being part of a true paradigm shift.