John Elkington

The landscape, which I’m used to seeing golden, was gloriously green as we Ubered south to Woodside, among the wealthiest communities in the country, clouds snagged in tree tops like cotton wool. We were meeting up with Carl Page, among other things of the Anthropocene Institute and LENR (Low Energy Nuclear Reactions). The Anthropocene makes sense to me, whereas am not sure what to make of LNER, recalling the Fleischmann and Pons days.

Carl spoke at a close to a million miles an hour, and comes at all this from a very different angle. But I was fascinated to wake up to the fact that his focus on trends that could kill a billion people exactly mirrors his brother Larry’s interest in trends that could benefit a billion people.

So the Page brothers helpfully define the outer limits of the impact line (negative impact to positive impact) in our Breakthrough Mapper.

We had a great session this evening with Chris Luebkeman at up, who I hadn’t seen for many years. We ranged from the future of cities through to the growing need for “reverse mentoring,” where older employees are schooled in the new mindsets, technologies and business models by younger employees. Older people need to “stop stopping” younger people from trying new things.

Young people today, he says, are “coming into a world which is a bit bonkers – in fact, it’s terrifying!” We are “up a creek without a paddle and without a boat – and the water is full of crocs and plastic debris.” Interestingly, while the focus is increasingly on the world’s mega-cities, his sense is that the real progress will come (and needs to come) in mid-tier cities, many of which are “struggling”.

We walked away with armloads of books and reports to read – and can’t wait to do so.

Later in the day, went across to IndieBio, described as the world’s first incubator for synthetic biology-based start-ups. We talked to Ryan Bethencourt, previously life sciences head at The X Prize Foundation, who noted that biology is “really exponential,” and to the founders of two start-ups: New Wave Foods and MycoWorks.

Here’s how IndieBio bill themselves:

“At Indie.bio, we’re committed to building a future where biology is not only a field of study, but a technology that will help solve our culture’s most challenging problems. From feeding a growing population, to providing energy and rare inputs for our increasingly connected economies, to treating or curing the maladies that limit or kill us, Synthetic Biology promises us solutions we’ve only dreamed of in the past.” And: “Independent biologists are now building tomorrow’s breakthrough biotech companies.”

Loved the spirit of New Wave Foods (“We disrupt food, not the oceans”) and MycoWorks. We heard from Dominique Barnes how New Wave started out focusing on mimicking shark-fin products, but switched to shrimp when they frenzied that the market was going to be constrained by the fact that such products are illegal in the US – limiting the potential for substitution. Shrimp, on the other hand, are mainstream and ecologically problematic.

Intriguingly, she was once a diver in a shark tank at the Golden Nugget in Las Vegas, a micro-ocean in the middle of a desert.

Fascinating to hear about the expanding MycoWork product range, based on fungi. Co-founder Philip Ross told us that the average car has 200 pounds of polyurethane in it – materials which could be replaced by materials produced by fungi from agricultural waste. He also noted that some of their products can substitute leather, with fungi producing materials in 2-3 weeks, while a cow might take 2-3 years.

Walking back to the hotel, we passed a gallery in Geary Street where they are displaying a large metallic shark sculpture, combined with the firing mechanisms of a machine gun. Googling suggests that it is designed by Christopher Schultz.

 

Our joint Volans-UN Global Compact team has begun its scouting mission, delving into San Francisco (and later LA) versions of the future. We kicked off last night with a fascinating dinner with Joel Makower of GreenBiz on 7 April, to which I contribute a monthly column. Among other things we talked about the evolution of his VERGE platform. Wish I’d thought of it!

Then this morning across to IDEO’s amazing studio under the Bay Bridge, where we met Iain Roberts, via an introduction from our advisory board member Tim Brown, IDEO’s CEO. Fantastic discussion of the role of design in system change – and our shared ambition to have a disproportionate impact in the world. And of the sorts of things that are ‘core’ and ‘edge’ at IDEO. And of the need for organisations to be increasingly “permeable”.

Interesting resonances with Carlota Perez‘s thinking around K-waves. (I had talked to her a few weeks earlier.) My thinking has centred around waves and cycles ever since I gave up Economics in 1968, but emerged with a deep interest in the work of two singularly unfashionable (at least at the time) economists, Nikolai Kondratiev and Joseph Schumpeter. Some of that thinking is now surfacing again in our work for the Global Compact and for there Business & Sustainable Development Commission.

Iain spoke of waves of technology crashing onto the beach – and San Francisco, and environs, is where much of that has happened since WWII. I have been back and forth here since the 1970s, in search of the latest in renewable energy, biotechnology and information technology, among other things.

 

Leaving later in the week for San Francisco and LA to do interviews for our twin programs for the UN Global Compact and the Business & Sustainable Development Commission. Key aim is to explore the cutting edge of science and technology – and get a sense of how it links to the objectives of the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the COP21 climate agreement. In that context, I was fascinated to see reference yesterday on Twitter to Adam Dorr’s essay on ‘Environmentalism and Technological Denialism‘. Got in touch with him and hoping to meet next week in LA.