One thing’s for sure, innovation is important. It doesn’t matter if you make Wonder Bread or computers you’ll find the word innovation in the company’s mission statement like a particularly hard to dig out piece of belly button lint.

While it’s easy to make fun of Hostess’s use of corporate buzzwords the word gets tossed around because it is important. It’s important to the continued success of nations and regions, for continued economic growth and on the micro scale it’s important for the continued success of companies.

At the macro scale innovation is represented by research and development, mostly done by large corporations and governments. You might be curious to know the results of the billions that the federal government spends on innovation. As Andrew Coyne has gloriously chronicled, the returns are scant.

On the scale where innovation would affect you, within your company, there are some handy rules to make sure that your innovation efforts add up. It’s easy for the higher-ups to say they want a fresh, new, innovative idea that’s going to make everybody money but the amount of work (and the potential disruption to the business plan) is rarely considered.

We spoke to Robert Porter Lynch about innovation and the man is an expert. An entrepreneur, an innovation consultant and a thought leader in the space of innovation, Lynch drops five necessary ingredients to innovation.

Management Buy-In

“Virtually no innovation projects get off the ground until senior management buys into it. The reason being is that if senior management doesn’t buy into there are no rewards for doing it,” says Lunch.

As the proverb says, the tallest blade of grass is the first to get cut down

“I’ve never met a senior manager who didn’t want innovation yet they don’t know how to get it, how to set up the system to make it work. That’s where trust comes into play. If you don’t have trust in your organization the innovation dries up because people won’t collaborate.”

Budget

A big budget might not be as important as you would think.

“I’ve been involved in businesses large and small over the years. I’ve been an entrepreneur. I’m in the midst of starting up another business now and I’ve found that the most innovative companies actually work on the leanest budgets.”

After all, the budget to build trust is minimal.

General Motors had all the money in the world. Who innovated from right underneath them? The Japanese — and on a shoestring at that.

Of course, budget is often intimately connected with management buy-in so it’s wise not to discount it entirely.

Rewards

Rewarding innovation is important but tricky especially since innovation can often come from outside the company.

For instance, the Mister Clean Magic Eraser is a blockbuster consumer product from Procter and Gamble. However it came from a supplier just by asking for it. They had most of the technology worked out but the P&G R&D team did the rest and you got an innovative new product.

Another very good example is the Swiffer. Lots of people use the Swiffer today, that’s technology that was sitting inside a supplier.

“You’d be astounded at the ideas you can generate just by bringing your suppliers together and talking to them and then sharing the rewards with them. They should be rewarded for the innovation that they bring to your company because everyone reaps the rewards,” says Lynch.

Diversity

Lynch believes diversity is absolutely essential for innovation. Not so much as having different genders or ethnic minorities (though that is important as well) but diversity in terms of education and problem solving styles.

“Innovation only comes differentials in thinking. If everyone thinks alike there’s no innovation, nothing changes.”

Innovation is often inconvenient.

In 1975, Steven Sasson, employed by Eastman Kodak, was charged with building an electronic camera using a charged coupled device. The resulting invention was the world’s first digital camera. The original digital camera also came nowhere near the user experience of even the most basic film cameras of the time. The camera was eight pounds and recorded a 0.01 megapixel black and white image to a cassette tape. It took 23 seconds to create an image.

Kodak buried it. Since Kodak made its money in film and film developing systems they quite rightly saw the digital camera as a threat to their business model.

Now Kodak is preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-protection.

This is not an isolated incident. It happened to the disk drive industry in the 90s. Large, entrenched firms created expensive disk drives, mostly for institutional clients. Smaller, nimbler companies created disk drives that were nowhere near as reliable but were cheaper and easier to use. The products put out by the upstarts were derided as ineffective toys.

The smaller, nimbler companies with the toy-like product ended up eating the lunches of the large institutional players as computers shifted from large mainframes to the desktop. The interesting thing about this case though, is that by any metric the large, entrenched companies made the right decision to ignore the new product.

That particular case inspired Clayton Christensen to write one of the most influential business books in recent memory, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. In the book Christensen uses this disk drive example as an exhaustive case study just how the innovator’s dilemma works.

You can read the first chapter of the book here.

And here’s a brief quote from Christensen explaining the idea further.

“Generally, disruptive innovations were technologically straightforward, consisting of off-the-shelf components put together in a product architecture that was often simpler than prior approaches. They offered less of what customers in established markets wanted and so could rarely be initially employed there. They offered a different package of attributes valued only in emerging markets remote from, and unimportant to, the mainstream.”

The offered less. They didn’t go after the mainstream. Yet, only forty years after Steve Sasson noodled around and created a digital camera, film is dead and so is Kodak.

The list of disruptive innovations is a long one and it covers everything from Wikipedia to LEDs to steamships. This finding by Christensen has sparked a whole publishing and consulting sub-industry that tries to explain the innovator’s dilemma to businesses and their executives.

This knowledge is especially useful if you work in the media or technology industries. As Blockbuster goes belly-up and newspapers and record labels struggle this all seems intuitive to us even if we don’t know why these companies fail.

Understanding this framework is useful for thinking about how markets evolve over time. It’s more than just that these old companies are stupid. They’re not. Grokking the innovator’s dilemma is important whether you work for an incumbent or a start-up.

There’s something imperceptibly seductive about Norway’s approach to innovation. The feeling first hit me during a long climb up a fire escape-like staircase at a refinery owned by Statoil ASA, the country’s mostly national oil company, outside the western city of Bergen.

I was there to report on a Norwegian foray into carbon capture and storage, a technology Canada has also turned to as a means of slowing runaway greenhouse gas emissions from Alberta’s oil sands and the province’s coal-fired power plants.

What occurred to me as I scaled the massive industrial apparatus – in actual fact a stairway grafted to the side of an Amine plant, used to strip carbon dioxide from a flue gas stream released by a nearby natural gas-fired power plant – was this: innovation is uncomfortable.

Wind whipped tiny droplets of rain across my safety glasses. The hard hat made my scalp itch. I was sweating underneath my neon-yellow coveralls. And my loaner steel-toed boots were a half-size too small. Only later, liberated from the layers of safety equipment, did I reflect on something more profound. The technology center at the Mongstad refinery, majority owned by state-run Gassnova SF, struck me as a methodical and entirely pragmatic approach to solving one of the great challenges of modern energy development.

Leaving aside the recession battered United States and chronically indebted European Union, demand for energy is going up just about everywhere. This raises a great many problems, not least the fact that today’s energy systems are old, consumers are gluttons and combustible fossil fuels like oil, natural gas and coal – burned at a scale that windmills and solar panels cannot replicate overnight – produce a nasty byproduct in quantities that is, depending on your outlook, either a) a nuisance, b) a threat to modern civilization or c) plant food.

Cue carbon capture and storage, or CCS for short. The technology has its share of critics. It is derided by some as a feel-good salve that literally sweeps GHGs under a geological rug, while doing little to address the root cause of those emissions. Producers of oil and electricity, to say nothing of the OECD countries they call home, view CCS as an enabler, however, one that will help them meet growing energy demand without incinerating the planet. What’s unique about Norway’s CCS endeavors – at least one project has stashed close to 15 million tonnes of unwanted carbon dioxide 1,000 metres below the North Sea since starting operations in 1996 – is the way their very existence transcends the controversy and doubt that has plagued the earliest carbon-abatement schemes in Alberta.

The Norwegian government seems acutely aware of its status as an early adopter. Policy makers were so keen to show off a test facility this past fall that they paid for my flight and hotel accommodation to Oslo just to see it. The charm offensive included a trip to Bergen, where Mongstad technology manager Olav Falk-Pedersen could scarcely contain his excitement at the potential for CCS. “I think this is great,” he beamed. He added severely: “Our product is results.”

The technology center is really an expensive sandbox. Its owners include Gassnova, a company set up by the Norwegian government to manage CCS research and development, Statoil, Shell and Sasol, the South African chemicals manufacturer. The idea is to use emissions from Statoil’s refinery and a recently built natural gas-fired combined-heat power plant to test various technologies designed to snare carbon dioxide, a notoriously expensive step in what remains a hugely expensive process. Plug-and-play trials are under way with technology providers Aker Clean Carbon and Alstom, based in Norway and France, respectively, to gauge the effectiveness of two distinct processes for what’s called “post-combustion” capture. The facility was designed with emissions from other heavy industries in mind; the test streams of carbon can be made “dirtier” to reflect exhaust from a coal-fired power plant, for instance. “Our job is to make sure the results have a high quality,” Falk-Pedersen told me. “It’s not our wish and goal to own technology.”

The scale of the work is enough to jolt an energy writer from Alberta, where a $2-billion commitment to CCS has been subject to budget cutbacks and widespread criticism. As a carbon reduction scheme, CCS is not perfect. Liability issues surrounding buried carbon remain unresolved, and there are few guarantees that pilot projects can evolve into full-blown commercial facilities amid a climate of fiscal austerity.

Yet I couldn’t help but think, during a long flight back to Calgary, that Alberta could learn from its Norwegian peers. The Scandinavian country is an oil-based economy unlike any other. It counts itself as the seventh- and 14^th-largest oil and natural gas exporter in the world, while petroleum accounted for 21 per cent of gross domestic product and 26 per cent of state revenues in 2010, according to the Ministry of Petroleum and Energy. As in Alberta, CCS is meant to deliver meaningful reductions in GHGs. The difference is that naysayers can go explore a pilot project in action.

The Organization of Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD) figures long-term growth rests in our ability to innovate. If managed properly, OECD says innovation and globalization will help build a stronger, cleaner and fairer global economy. The organization is currently working on an Innovation Strategy for the 21^st century, but a few cities around the world are already making the case to be a poster child for innovation.

It so happens, figuring out where the world’s most innovative cities are located isn’t an easy task and there is more than one organization on the case. In October 2011, Australian organization 2thinknow, released its index of the Top 100 innovative cities in the world. Boston took the top spot and Toronto was the top Canadian city in the 10^th spot. In January 2012, the Intelligent Community Forum, released its list of the Top 7 Intelligent Communities in the world. Austin, Texas was number one on the list and Quebec City was the top Canadian city at number three.

Here’s a closer look at a few cities from both lists:

Boston

Population: 617,594

Boston was established in 1630 and became a city in 1822. “Beantown” has played an innovative and central role in American history for over 300 years and made advances from science and engineering to culture and society. Early achievements in U.S. history included the first public anti-smoking law; the first public park; the first U.S. mail route, which operated between Boston and New York; and the first American lighthouse. Analysts with 2thinknow put Boston at the top of their list because of more recent achievements, including the city’s dominant institutions of Harvard and MIT, as well as its strength in start-ups and arts.

Austin, Texas

Population: 757,688

Austin prides itself on being “weird,” but there’s nothing strange about how the Texas city sauntered down the dusty trail of innovation. In the late-‘80s, 14 semiconductor manufacturers and the U.S. government created a partnership called SEMATCH to solve common manufacturing problems. Austin was selected as the headquarters and it sparked a technology boom. Growth robust and it looked like the city’s economy was as close to recession-proof as possible – until the dot.com collapse of 2001 that tripled the unemployment rate.

A long-term economic development strategy from the city and the local chamber of commerce led to a nearly $6 billion increase in regional payrolls during five years. A second five-year plan launched in 2010 seeks to add another $11 billion. To address a workforce challenge, Austin has established a program that puts college enrollment managers into public schools to guide the choices made by students, which has helped boost the graduation rate for low-income students 14 percentage points to 75 per cent.

Oulu, Finland

Population: 141,742

Located in northern Finland, Oulu is the country’s sixth largest city, but home to one of the world’s largest companies – Nokia. During the past two centuries, civic leaders in the city have seen industries come and go, from tar and wood in the age of sail to leather goods, fishing and heavy equipment manufacturing. When heavy industry went into a steep decline, the Nokia Research Center became one of Oulu’s biggest employers. City leaders remained alert to the threat of employment concentrated in a single large company and founded the Oulu Technology Park to incubate more small-to-medium-sized businesses. Despite the financial crisis that hit in 2007, Oulu has managed to create 18,000 jobs in high technology, thanks to risk-taking in education and strong public-private collaboration.

Quebec City

Population: 638,000

Quebec City was founded in 1608 and is recognized as the cradle of French civilization in North America. The capital of La Belle Province has long been a cultural and economic hub, and in the midst of the recession, the city’s unemployment rate was less than 5 per cent. Home to major universities, it ranks number one in Canada and number two in North America for university students per capita. Quebec City also has Canada’s largest per capita concentration of researchers.

Regional GDP has grown 30 per cent in the past 10 years, driven largely by R&D and high-tech businesses. Yet in the 1980s, Quebec City accounted for only three per cent of high-tech jobs in the entire province. A decision by local government to interconnect the city’s universities and business community transformed a political capital into a technology capital. Quebec Metro High Tech Park is now home to nearly 100 companies employing 5,000 people and the park’s management team continues to advise and steer promising applications from universities into commercial development.

Saint John, New Brunswick

Population: 69,000

Saint John was incorporated in 1785 and more than two centuries later when most of the world celebrated the start of the new century, the year 2000 was a time for mourning in “Canada’s Original City.” A shipbuilding contract from the federal government came to an end and a major food manufacturer closed its plant in the same year. A long period of industrial decline had suddenly reached crisis point.

While it had Canada’s largest per capita decline in manufacturing from 1989 to 2003, Saint John also saw eight per cent growth in services, double the Canadian average. To accelerate that positive trend, the city created a partnership with education, health care, the provincial government, cultural institutions and business. It targeted ICT, life sciences, tourism, energy and advanced manufacturing for growth. In a strategy called True Growth, the city engaged with local employers and educators to identify and recruit skilled young people emerging from secondary school and university. It also recruited skilled immigrants and launched a mentorship program to connect immigrant entrepreneurs with business executives.

Photo of Quebec City courtesy of Emmanuel Huybrechts

Suneet Singh Tuli isn’t your typical innovator. Rather, the chief executive officer of Datawind – the Montreal-based tech company responsible for manufacturing the world’s cheapest tablet – seems to look at innovation from the outside in. For Tuli, a product’s function is only half as important as its user.

That was his thinking when he and a number of Datawind engineers manufactured the Aakash tablet in Feburary of 2011.Datawind won a tender from the Indian government to mass produce over 8 million tablet devices, each for the cost of around $52 (set to retail at around US$40 after government subsidies). The first 100,000 tablets will be shipped to an eager group of Indian students in Feburary 2012.

Tuli says manufacturing the tablet for Indian buyers required an entirely new approach to innovation. “We looked at markets differently; we looked at scale in a whole new sense,” he says. “It’s sort of an unexplored or non-existent commercial market.”

Over the past year the Aakash has sparked an online frenzy with its absurdly low retail value. Middle class Indian people could now afford a web browsing device that would have been unattainable only months before. The online buzz had the Indian-born Canadian shuttling around the country for media interviews and product presentations. “It was hectic,” he recalls.

What do a billion people actually want?

The key to designing the Aakash was taking into account what the market actually wanted from a tablet, rather than re-creating a product that attracts North American customers. It had to start with the buyer, not the manufacturer. “(Manufacturers) make subjective decisions on what is important to them, and what features they’d prefer to use,” Tuli says. “And I think that’s a huge mistake when you design a product.”

Datawind achieved its low price by manufacturing and integrating many of its components in-house, as well as using the free Google Android operating system. Its seven-inch touchscreen cost a tenth the price of Apple’s device, though it doesn’t allow the “pinch and zoom” features the iPad does. Applications like power point or video games that require a lot of memory will also take longer to load on the Aakash (about 3 to 10 seconds).

Despite this, Tuli says the product is ideal for the Indian market. Only about 10 per cent of the population currently has Internet access, he says, and therefore have very limited expectations of their tablet’s capabilities. Too much emphasis has been placed on costly features that most Indian customers could easily do without. “The consumer, to a great degree, will accept ‘good enough,’” Tuli says.

Considering the enormous market potential in India, North American tablet manufacturers have been slow to supply an affordable product to developing nations. Tuli attributes this to a lack of understanding of the customer base they are striving to reach. “It is very difficult to design for a customer that you have no knowledge of,” Tuli says.

Although only a small percentage of the Indian population has access to Internet, there are about 800 million mobile phone users country-wide. That makes for an astonishing gap in the market for low-cost manufacturers like Datawind, which have the ability to tap into this largely untouched consumer base.

Popular products

One of Datawind’s newer tablet devices, the UbiSlate7+, has already made serious inroads into India’s end user market. It is essentially an upgraded version of the Aakash student tablet, with nearly double the processing power. Since unveiling the tablet, the company has received over 2.2 million orders for the product. “The floodgates of Internet access for the developing world are opening up in ways that were unimaginable a short few months ago,” Tuli says.

Demand has been so large Datawind is struggling to pump out enough tablets to keep up. Currently they are outsourcing two manufacturing hubs capable of producing about 1 million tablets a year. Tuli is now in the process of outsourcing an additional two plants. At best, Datawind will remain about six months behind on production.

That has Tuli working around the clock. He’ll do a media interview at 1 a.m., then frantically pore over an hour’s worth of emails only to wake up for a 7 a.m. breakfast meeting the next morning.

But he isn’t phased by the grueling work schedule. When the product does make it to market, he believes the customers will appreciate its value – even if it’s a far cry from the top-end tablets currently in the market. “The intent isn’t to create the ultimate product,” he says.

Housing is expensive. It’s also necessary, which has led more than a few folks to innovate in their approach to their living situation. While treehouses, yurts and modular homes provide regular lodging for some, a variety of less unusual options also exist.

Cohousing

The construction of a cluster of private homes arranged around a shared common building was developed in Denmark in the 1960s. But mention cohousing to others today and for the unfamiliar, notions of communes or cults may first come to mind.

Not so, say those who live in this arrangement – and there’s an increasing number of them. Across Canada, cohousing communities exist in various stages of development, including seven forming communities, four communities in development and nine completed communities, according to the Canadian Cohousing Network.

“I joined to have a sense of connection and to know my neighbours,” says Alan Carpenter, who has lived in Langley, B.C.’s WindSong cohousing community since it opened in 1996 (it was the first in Canada). Carpenter is co-founder of the Canadian Cohousing Network and is often consulted by new groups wanting to start their own community.

While people living in cohousing communities have their own private home – about 20 to 30 units is ideal, says Carpenter – they share a “common house” with amenities that may include a kitchen, dining room, children’s playroom, guest rooms, home office support and laundry.

Interaction with neighbours in this shared space allows for a return to the best of small town life (that’s what writer Tyee Bridge discovered when he went inside Calgary’s Prairie Sky Cohousing community). And along with the social connections that are formed there are sustainability advantages, such as the sharing of resources and space that decreases individual needs.

Carpenter says co-housing attracts a variety of people of all generations, especially those who are proactive and want to make a difference in the world. And what about the disadvantages to cohousing? Carpenter pauses, taking a moment to consider. “I haven’t run into any of those yet,” he says.

Laneway Housing

“In Vancouver, there’s no such things as a single family lot anymore,” says Brent Toderian, Vancouver’s director of city planning. Toderian can take partial credit for that – he set the laneway housing program in motion back in 2006. A 2009 bylaw approved the small, residential buildings, which range from 500 to 750 square feet, on essentially all single-family lots in the city.

The “hidden density” of laneway houses, which aren’t obvious when looking at the front of the house, is combined with the “invisible density” of the city’s secondary suites. Taken together, these policies mean most lots in Vancouver are now zoned for a minimum of three households, which adds density to existing neighbourhoods while reducing environmental and economic effects of sprawl.

“It wasn’t about developers, it was about ordinary lot owners who desperately needed more flexibility within their own property lines,” says Toderian of one of laneway housing’s many appeals (you can read more on his blog, here).

So far interest from those ordinary lot owners has been steady and distributed across the city, and firms like Smallworks and Lanefab have popped up to cater to this new clientele. The city reached 150 occupied units last November and Toderian expects that unit 500 will be approved early this year. As far as he can tell, those numbers are unprecedented anywhere in North America.

Monitoring of laneway housing has been ongoing and the next step is to find out who occupies the units. Toderian expects that answer to change over time and describes multiple scenarios: a renter who acts as a mortgage helper, a family who offers the space to their teenage children, and aging parents who want to live close to family or a caregiver. “We expect to see all sorts of different scenarios and we expect those scenarios to constantly evolve,” Toderian says.

Tiny Housing

Tiny is cool. From Legoland’s Miniland, featuring reproductions of real cities constructed by Lego blocks at a 1:20 scale, to pygmy hippos that measure one fifth the size of the common hippopotamus, there’s an allure to the small.

Now houses can join that list, thanks to people like Jay Shafer. Shafer lived in an 89 square foot house in California until two years ago (he now shares a 500 square foot house with his wife and baby) and owns Tumbleweed Tiny House Company. The firm, which sells various tiny houses ready made or to be self-built, also helps people build their own tiny houses through workshops (including one in Toronto this March).

“It’s liberating to not have to deal with a lot of space I’m not actually using,” Shafer says of his motivation for living in such a small space. “Saving money and saving time has really made my life much better.”

Shafer notes that he doesn’t think everyone needs to live in 89 square feet, but that “a small house is any house where all the space is being used well.”

Tumbleweed’s business comes from all sorts of people, many whose motivations for living small are driven by economics and sustainability. “People are starting to think more about their real needs and what kind of structure would suit those needs and not exceed them,” Shafer says. Those people are located across North America – from Toronto’s smallest house to a “sliver of a home” in Victoria, B.C.

But while small houses may make sense from an economic and environmental point of view, there are building codes that dictate how small a house can be (not how big a house can be – find more details here). Those determined to live in their tiny houses, like Shafer, often bypass the codes by putting their house on wheels, which makes it a trailer rather than a house.

When Gregg Oldring agreed to meet me for a coffee, he didn’t do it with a handshake or a text message. Instead, he sent me an electronic contract with terms and conditions, “Gregg will meet Geoff for a coffee,” and, with the click of a mouse, I agreed.

It was one of the more rudimentary contracts Oldring has written since March 2011, when he began working on Inkdit, his newest Internet-based business. Inkdit is an online system for managing contracts between companies, clients or two people agreeing to meet for a coffee. Oldring and two colleagues launched the early-stage version of the service in June 2011. Six months later, in January, Oldring and his team at Inkdit, including developer Brendan Taylor and designer Kevin Horek, started collecting subscription revenue from Inkdit clients. That launched Inkdit from its beta stage into a full online business.

Oldring, Taylor and Horek share an office on Edmonton’s 104 Avenue overlooking the café they visit every morning without fail at 9:30 a.m. to stay caffeinated as they build the infrastructure behind Inkdit. All three believe there is huge potential in electronic contracts, and want Inkdit to be the leader in shifting how contracts – even mortgages, and shareholder agreements – are signed. As Taylor says, “There really are huge possibilities,” he says. “We’re touching on stuff that has been in science fiction for years.”

“It’s great being in a new space,” Taylor says. “It gives us freedom to explore new ideas that present themselves and it frees us from chasing after our competitors. On the flipside, we don’t know what the right direction is all the time.” Oldring agrees: “We’re doing something new, which makes it potentially great, but it’s also riskier.” Oldring understands the risk-reward equation like any other entrepreneur, especially given that Inkdit isn’t Oldring’s first online business. In 1995 he built GS Net, which worked like an early version of the popular second-hand-car website, AutoTrader. He eventually sold that business and went on to co-found Industry Mailout, which manages email campaigns for more than 2,000 clients, including Canada’s largest banks, like CIBC and Alberta’s ATB Financial. Businesses in multiple sectors of the economy use Industry Mailout, including lawyers, financial advisors and even clothing companies. In fact, Oldring says, “Our first customer was Polo Jeans out of New York.”

In March, when Oldring and his partners at Industry Mailout chose to start a subsidiary company, Inkdit, they envisioned a new online product that could eclipse the size of Industry Mailout in time. “It’s another subscription-based business and the network is potentially bigger this time,” Oldring says. “We have to look at this as a multi-facing business model where the general public can use it.” The new company hopes to leverage the clients and contacts of the old company, but also be available in places like schools, so that parents can sign waivers for student field trips.

At its most basic level, Inkdit is an online software-as-a-service company that lets one person or organization manage contracts in a way that resembles a social network, like LinkedIn. In the same way that LinkedIn lets one businessperson manage their contacts as they change jobs, Inkdit lets people and businesses track contractual agreements through their account even if that person or business changes their name. “A project like this is kind of ongoing and there are always things you can improve,” Horek says, his desk covered in gadgetry, including two tablets, two mobile phones, a laptop and a desktop computer. He both designs how the Inkdit interface will look and feel, as well as their mobile applications and interface. “I want everything mobile. I want my app to work on a tablet or on a phone, so to me, that’s fun and kind of new, and kind of a challenge at the same time.”

Electronic contracts themselves are not new. Industry Mailout uses e-contracts when new users sign up for an account. The Inkdit concept however, of applying social networking principles to e-contract management is new. Oldring says the idea came to him when he tried to cancel Industry Mailout’s mobile phone agreement. The company’s mobile provider demanded money in return for closing Industry Mailout’s file. “I said, ‘I’m reading the contract, and I see the terms and I don’t owe you anything,” Oldring says. “Their answer was, ‘Well, that’s not the policy.’ I had this argument going for a long time and it occurred to me that no one I was talking to had this contract in front of them.”

Further, Oldring says, retrieving the contract from the mobile company’s physical files would have been time consuming and expensive. “If they had this contract, and it was easily accessible, they might never have [fought with me],” Oldring says. “That was a real opportunity.”

This month, Oldring, Horek and Taylor are adding several security features to Inkdit, including a function that allows for “shared secrets” and “two-factor identification.” The first, shared secrets, would require both parties signing a contract to use a mutually accepted password to access a contract. The second, two-factor identification, would require someone accessing a contract to use both a computer and a mobile phone to access a contract, therefore making it very difficult to break into an Inkdit account.

Eventually, Oldring hopes the general public will be comfortable signing major contracts online through Inkdit, just as consumers have become comfortable with online banking. But he’s not pushing people beyond their comfort level, or beyond what Inkdit currently allows. “What I have learned is not to explain what it’s going to be, but only to explain what it is at this point. That’s my biggest challenge personally, because I love to talk about where it’s headed but my brain tends to be two, three, twenty years out from where we are today and I have to hold that back when I’m talking to people.”

The Idea: Storable Solar

The Upside: One of the biggest problems with solar energy is the fact that it can’t be stored for use at a later date. Until that problem is rectified, there will almost certainly be a place in our energy mix for non-renewable fossil fuels. Enter heat-storing chemicals, which can capture the energy, store it for an indefinite period and release it on demand. The idea itself isn’t new – in fact, it was discovered decades ago – but the ability to produce a low-cost chemical compound that would make it economically viable is. There’s still work to be done, but it may not be long before we are able to literally capture the sun’s energy. Whether we use it to continue to power a Kardashian-infested entertainment industry remains to be seen.

The Idea: Micro Nuclear

The Upside: You probably wouldn’t want to live next to a nuclear power plant, so why would you want it in your own back yard? Well, for one thing, because it would provide you with ultra low-cost and environmentally-friendly (or, friendlier) power than traditional sources. We’re already on the verge of micro-nuclear generators. While they’re unlikely to be used in residential neighbourhoods any time soon they’re perfectly suited for remote communities or those without ready access to conventional sources of electricity. If they do find their way into residential areas, well, just think of the wars that neighbours will be able to get into.

The Idea: Nanomedicine

The Upside: Remembering to take your medicine can be a major hassle for some people, and the implications of forgetting life-threatening for others. But imagine if they could get an injection that would distribute that medicine for them? That’s a goal that doctors working in the field of nanomedicine are making progress on. Researchers in the Netherlands have already developed a pill that can be loaded with medicine and configured to travel to a specific part of the body to deliver it. Given that it’s being developed in the Netherlands, the odds are pretty good that at least a few of those pills will be calibrated to carry THC.

The Idea: Vertical farming

The Upside: The world’s quickly running out of productive arable land, and with the population surging past 7 billion something’s got to give, right? Well, sure – but that something might be our two-dimensional view of agriculture. Dickson Despommier, a professor emeritus of environmental health sciences and microbiology at Columbia University has been working for more than a decade on the idea – and its inherent challenges, which include access to enough water, light and energy to effectively grow plants. But if scientists can get it right, it may be able to meet many of the developed world’s food needs. Despommier estimates that a single 30-story vertical farm could feed as many as 50,000 people. Imagine a city filled with them.

The Idea: Wireless-E

The Upside: Transmission towers are aesthetically displeasing, electrical cords are a tripping hazard and batteries are an environmental nuisance. But we could get rid of all three – and make life much easier in the process – if scientists can make headway on developing so-called “Wireless-E.” Instead of having to plug devices into sockets, they would pick up on the radiant energy in the atmosphere – a little like how our portable devices pick up on wireless network connections today. It’s still in the conceptual stage, and it might sound a bit crazy. Then again, if you’d told people fifteen years ago that you’d one day be able to access the Internet from your phone they’d have thought you were crazy too.

The Idea: Bioprinters
The Upside: Nobody uses printers any more, right? Well, that may be true when it comes to ink and paper, but scientists may one day find a more vital purpose – literally – for the printer. Imagine, one day not too far in the future, having a robotic surgeon replace your diseased liver (so you like a glass of bourbon now and then. And then. And then. Maybe the future’s really depressing, okay?) with one produced on a “bioprinter” that grows living human tissue layer by layer. It’s unlikely that they’ll be able to print off any artificially generated willpower, though.

The Idea: Robotic Earthworms

The Upside: For all the recent improvements we’ve made, human beings are still a spectacularly wasteful species. We’re constantly throwing out things, either as a byproduct of our industrial activities or our personal consumption habits, which have real economic value. As a result, one day soon our landmines may well be regarded as smelly but potentially profitable gold mines. Who will do the digging? What about robotic earthworms, programmable devices capable of sorting the good (base metals, for example) from the bad. In the process, they would turn the remaining organic material into valuable top soil, just like their terrestrial counterparts. Added bonus: they’ll automatically sterilize the magpies that try to eat them.

The Idea: Lunar Nuclear Weapons

The Upside: Soon we’ll be able to leave Bruce Willis and the rest of Hollywood’s intergalactic asteroid hunters down on the surface. Instead, by outfitting the moon with its own nuclear arsenal, we human beings can rest more comfortably knowing that any incoming asteroids or meteors can be blown to smithereens before they ever threaten earth. It does beg the question, though: is a world that Ben Affleck is allowed to play a key role in protecting from imminent disaster really worth saving?

Idea: Self-Energizing Aquatic Mobile Units (SEAMu)

Upside: Sure, Waterworld was a bad movie – unforgivably bad, even. But that shouldn’t dissuade you from the idea of living in a city at sea. Enter the Self-Energizing Aquatic Mobile unit, a spherical home that would be completely energy self-sufficient and able to bob peacefully along in any of the world’s oceans – and even under them, for a period of time. The unit would be constructed of a sphere inside another, with only lubricated bearings separating the two. That way, the interior sphere – your home – would remain upright and stable while the outer one pitched and tilted with the waves. We’re a ways away from running out of habitable land just yet – have you been to Saskatchewan lately? – but when we do, these may provide a more palatable alternative than pods on the moon.

Idea: The Tricorder

Upside: Yes, you too will be able to play Doctor Beverly Crusher (or, if you’re so inclined, Katherine Pulaski, although we can’t imagine why you would be) on a day other than Halloween if Richard Branson has his way. The latest “X PRIZE” competition challenges inventors to come up with a functional equivalent of the Star Trek prop, and offers them $10 million if they get it right. The idea is to take advantage of the computing powers of mobile devices and the reams of healthcare-related information on the internet to make staying healthy easier to achieve and understand. As the good captain would say – make it so.

Idea: Nanofiltration

Upside: Water has long been regarded as the 21st century’s equivalent to oil, and while there haven’t been any wars that have broken out yet over access to fresh drinking water it’s not difficult to imagine just how quickly they could. The good news is that scientists are making impressive progress towards the development of nanofiltration systems capable of turning even the most ruinously contaminated liquid into potable drinking water. Except for Ouzo, that is. Nothing can make that stuff drinkable.

Idea: Crash-proof Cars

Upside: Not surprisingly, Volvo – the standard-bearer when it comes to automotive safety – has already promised to deliver crash-proof cars in the not-so-distant future. The vehicles would use radar, sonar and driver alert systems to navigate the road, leaving the driver – you – free to text, sext or whatever the kids are doing by then. Given that automobile accidents claim the lives of tens of thousands of people every year, the technology should be a welcome addition. Added bonus: the vehicles will still be more fun to drive than a Smart Car.

Idea: Universal GPS

Upside: It’s a pain in the butt when you can’t find your cell phone, your glasses or your favourite pair of jeans. Soon, you’ll have to find other things to worry about, because the advent of universal GPS – linked, no doubt, to an app on that missing phone of yours – will make it a snap to find just about anything. This may be a particularly welcome development for parents, who will be able to let their children roam free around the neighbourhood without ever actually losing track of them. They’ll also be alerted when professional children’s entertainers, registered sex offenders and Toronto Maple Leafs fans are in the area so they can prevent them from emotionally traumatic interactions. Welcome to the age of free range parenting.

Idea: Rechargeable Roads

Upside: If you’re a) old enough, and b) lucky enough, you grew up playing with your own remote control racing car track. Eventually, the same general principle might apply to your real car. Scientists have already figured out a way for buses to run on automated routes wirelessly – that is, without power poles or combustion engines – that instead use transmitters built into the roads. In the future, the same mechanism could be applied to the roads that our cars travel on, making the idea of “fueling up” as prehistoric as segregated drinking fountains. Likewise, the roads themselves could also be outfitted with solar paint and panels to generate energy that could be routed into the general grid. Exciting stuff, to be sure, but there’s been no word yet on whether we’ll be building any loop-de-loops to drive through.

Idea: An Addiction Pill

Upside: Contrary to popular belief, there is no such thing as an addictive personality. There is, however, the possibility that your inability to break free of your addiction to cigarettes/heroin/food/alcohol/gambling/cat videos on the Internet is the product of a biochemical imbalance that makes you more prone to getting hooked. Once they’ve worked out an appropriate financial settlement with the liquor, tobacco and gaming companies, scientists will proudly unveil a pill that balances out these flaws in our brain chemistry. All of a sudden, the idea of smoking crack while eating three large pepperoni pizzas and watching My Little Pony reruns won’t seem as wildly appetizing as it once did. It’s up to you to decide if that’s a good thing or not, of course.

Idea: Building materials that wipe out pollution

Upside: Paint and concrete using photocatalytic technology transform nitrogen oxides from car engines into harmless water, oxygen and salts using nothing but light and the power of science. Build enough structures out of photocatalytic materials, and you could conceivably strip the air of those nasty pollutants. The best part? This futuristic tech already exists and is being incorporated into building projects in Canada, the U.S. and Europe. There’s even talk of using the technology to make clothes or other products, but for now it’s at least the right time to paint the house and repave the driveway.

Idea: Geo-engineering

Upside: Global warming got you down? Too lazy to actually cut your emissions or limit your carbon footprint? No problem – just hack the environment. What was once considered a terrible, unrealistic idea now seems not so far-fetched: to cool the earth, just pump massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere. It’ll have approximately the same effect as setting off a volcano, except without the ash or burnt villages. And after you’ve at least temporarily reversed global warming, you can work on new environmentally friendly technologies, like trapping tornadoes to power our cities. Nothing could possibly go wrong.

Idea: BU-005

Upside: It’s a potentially world-ending scenario – a drug-resistant strain of a horrible disease wipes out billions of people as scientists rush to create a better medicine. Fortunately for us, they may already have figured it out – BU-005, a synthetic compound, can prevent that disaster by shutting down the structure that lets bacteria rid themselves of pesky antibiotics. Outgunning bacteria is becoming increasingly difficult, but with BU-005 we can effectively outsmart evolution itself. Who knows – this could even be what saves us from the zombie apocalypse.

Idea: Transgenic poplars

Upside: Trees are good for the environment. Mutant poplar trees genetically engineered to suck pollutants out of the air are even better. Thanks to a gene borrowed from rabbits, scientists are developing a breed of transgenic poplar that renders a host of carcinogenic substances harmless. The plan, once testing is complete and the trees are USDA approved, is to plant the trees around sites contaminated by hazardous materials, making the clean-up process infinitely cheaper and easier. It’s the arboreal version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, except they fight pollution instead of crime.

Idea: Solar road snake

Upside: It’s been established that cars are anything but environmentally friendly. However, bright minds have been coming up with ways to make the roads they drive on greener while also solving the world’s energy woes. One of the problems with solar energy is the difficulty of find space to put enough solar panels, but these roadway projects might have solution. One proposal is to build a massive snake made of solar panels around the Santa Monica freeway through the middle of Los Angeles, providing the city with a huge source of clean energy, as well as charging stations for electric cars and a system to make algae fuel from exhaust fumes.

Idea: Fast nuclear reactors

Upside: Chernobyl shmernobyl – despite concerns about the technology, nuclear energy remains one of our best chances for a sustainable future. And an experimental type of reactor that uses “fast” neutrons could just be what makes nuclear feasible, by virtually eliminating the nuclear waste created by traditional thermal reactors. Fast reactors make it possible to recycle nuclear waste, eliminating the need to come up with expensive storage solutions and bypassing concerns about a shortage of uranium. It’s a perfect solution, and although the plants use highly reactive (read: explosive) molten sodium as a coolant the technology is completely safe. Honest.

Idea: Solar power from space

Upside: It’s a gigantic solar-powered space laser, but instead of destroying the world it would provide 500,000 homes with power. The sun has 10 trillion times the energy currently being consumed on Earth, but very little of that energy actually reaches our planet thanks to distance, night-time and clouds. Building solar panels in space that could then beam the energy directly to us would make the whole process more efficient. It could also be possible to use much less dangerous microwaves instead of a laser, but having a giant solar space laser still seems cooler than a space microwave – either way, though, the first one could be operational by 2030.

Idea: Smart decline

Upside: Shrinking cities leave so-called zombie subdivisions with empty lots and overgrown infrastructure. While they may not shamble about trying to devour brains, these abandoned communities suck the life from local economies, making them a close relative of vampires. Smart decline is the bright idea that rather than leaving these areas to rot, we should give new life to cities by letting nature reclaim unused infrastructure, or replacing it with parks, swimming pools and other facilities that make neighbourhoods better. It’s less dramatic than a shotgun blast to the head, maybe, but also less messy.

Idea: Portable wind power

Upside: The solar-powered calculator was one of the first attempts to scale down green energy. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a completely useless device that wouldn’t allow you to do math indoors unless tilted to precisely the right angle. The Windbelt shows somewhat greater promise. An arm-sized wind-power source for electric lights in the third world, it’s not quite small enough to fit in someone’s pocket but is considerably smaller than a windmill. Using magnets and vibration, it requires only a gentle wind to function, and is a breeze – terrible pun intended – to maintain. And as an added bonus, the Windbelt is guaranteed not to burn your house down, unlike the kerosene lamps it hopes to replace.

Idea: A better battery

Upside: Modern lithium-ion batteries aren’t much good for powering anything bigger than a remote control, one of the reasons cars still rely on nasty combustion engines. But a breakthrough in battery tech could change that: the lithium-air battery. Where current batteries use metal oxides as their positive electrode, lithium-air batteries use carbon. This makes them capable of producing more energy than the Energizer Bunny ever dreamed of – it also makes them too chemically unstable to recharge and causes them to explode when wet. Or slightly damp. Or really when there’s any moisture present in the air at all. But they’re working on that.

Idea: Advanced prosthetics

Upside: In the future, your limbs will be obsolete. Science is in the process of creating a better prosthetic, complete with electronic skin that can feel and functional muscles made from carbon nanotubes. Prototypes now can be controlled with a thought. And once scientists perfect the artificial limb so that it feels and functions just like the real thing, the only question is how long it takes for those advanced prosthetics to become even better. Given the option to upgrade from your current arm to one that’s stronger, more flexible, interfaces with your cell phone and is Wi-Fi enabled – who wouldn’t opt for the upgrade?

Idea: Human-powered monorail and/or gym

Upside: Biking to work is so last century. So are buses. And stationary bikes or elliptical machines? In the future, all of these things will be combined into a bigger, better system of human-powered public transportation. Imagine – you get up, get dressed, and hop on the human monorail outside your door. You take it down to the river, where you get into a river gym powered by your exercise to take you across, then back on the monorail. Sure, you’re a bit sweaty when you get to the office, but you were busy saving the environment.

Idea: Oceanic carbon storage

Upside: One of our best bets for reducing global warming is carbon capture and storage, preventing CO2 from entering the atmosphere – the only question, though, is what do we do once we’ve caught it? One possibility: storing it in gigantic sausage-shaped bags on the ocean floor. Once shipped 20,000 leagues under the sea – actually, just three kilometres will do – carbon dioxide is so condensed and cold that it sinks instead of rising, meaning it won’t escape into the atmosphere. If punctured, the bags would leak out into the ocean, which isn’t exactly great for the environment either, but that’s a problem for another day.

Idea: Wearable computers

Upside: When is a shirt not a shirt? When it’s also your computer. An international team of scientists has created cotton thread that functions as electrical circuits and transistors, making it possible to computerize your clothes without attaching a motherboard to the back. Digitally-enabled clothes could have a whole range of life-saving possibilities. A properly-programmed t-shirt could allow doctors to remotely monitor the status of patients without the need for bulky electronics, or it could alert the wearer to the presence of deadly pollutants in their environment. Your favourite pair of jeans could be even more stylish and practical.

“Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell who you are”

This quote from seventeenth-century French food writer Jean Anthelme-Brillat-Savarin has always struck me as profound. Given record levels of both obesity and hunger it can also be a bit sad. It’s also used as a chapter starter in Jennifer Cockrall-King’s call to arms for urban agriculturalists Food and the City.

The Edmonton-based food writer has crafted a convincing case that food can and indeed should, be produced and distributed at a certain scale in our cities.

The first four chapters lay out a familiar theme, especially if you’re familiar with the work of Michael Pollan, Raj Patel or Wendell Berry. The privations of the industrial food system on our health and environment are well known at this point. Subjects like food deserts, climate change, peak oil, food security and the loss of bio-diversity are ticked off at the beginning of the book so as to set up the premise – that it’s time to reorganize our food system.

If we’re going to reorganize something as important as how our food is grown and sold to us we better have some alternatives. With that Cockrall-King takes us on a world tour to the places and the people who are making it work.

Our first stop has us being whisked to Paris, which interestingly enough, is ground zero for urban agriculture. In the latter half of the 19^th century there were more than 8500 urban farmers or maraichers working 1400 hectares of land – roughly sixteen per cent of the area of Paris at the time. The gardens, fed as they were with prodigious amounts of horse dung, were ultra productive. Modern-day Paris is obviously a different story but Cockrall-King is a capable storyteller and finds some truly interesting people and places during her times in France.

We also get introduced to the world of urban beekeeping in Paris. Domesticated city bees are a recurring character in the book popping up all over the world. With a more varied diet and less pesticides urban bees are happier, produce more honey and are much more resilient.

The book also takes us to London and an urban vineyard. We then venture to Los Angeles and learn the heartbreaking story of the South Central Garden, and to Vancouver with its prolific roof top greenery. Cockrall-King also visits Toronto and Chicago and even finds some time for Milwaukee (or Milliwaukee as Alice Cooper prefers to call it).

The books ends in Cuba, an interesting case study of what would happen to a food system if cheap fossil fuels vanished. When the Soviet Union collapsed Cuba stopped getting oil on the cheap. Massive, centralized farms turned into small, decentralized plots. While the Cuban experience is not something any country would engage in willingly it provided a near perfect control case for an alternative food system. However, one could get the idea that Cuba is entirely self-sufficient and that is just not the case as the country spends roughly $2 billion a year on food imports.

As someone who is interested in gardening, permaculture and how our food system is organized this really hit a sweet spot of overlapping interests for me.

This book is recommended for anyone wanting to read a critical take of the current food system and  anyone looking for a blueprint to starting the new food revolution.

Volunteering – or perhaps more simply, just helping other people – annually has a spot on lists dedicated to the most common New Year’s resolutions. From building houses to distributing food to the hungry, caring for the elderly, coaching in athletic programs or mentoring at risk youth, doing more for other people can take on a variety of forms.

If the extra time needed for volunteering isn’t something that’s available, you could always make a difference while taking a job with a social enterprise. Or, if you’re passionate enough about your cause and figure your goods or services could bring in a fairly consistent revenue stream, you could always join the entrepreneurial ranks and start your own social business.

What’s a social enterprise, you ask? Good question. For a quick explanation, check out (this hyperlink) to another Unlimited story.

In the meantime, here’s a look at two social enterprises trying to earn a bit of money in an effort to make Edmonton a better community.

Live Local

FAST FACTS

Website: http://www.live-local.ca/

Year Established: 2010

Social Goal: support and develop sustainable, vibrant communities by supporting local independent businesses

Number of Employees: 8 (mostly part-time)

Number of Volunteers: usually one or two on staff

Revenue in 2011: About $900,000

Even with more than two decades of experience in the hospitality industry, when Jessie Radies and her husband Darcy opened the doors to the Blue Pear in 2000 she wasn’t quite prepared for the solitary life of operating an independent fine dining restaurant.

“I came out of the franchise world,” Radies says. “When my husband and I bought this fine dining restaurant, he was in his element as a chef because he came from the gourmet world working for an independent restaurant.”

The volume and prices of the downtown Edmonton restaurant weren’t what Radies was used to from her days working for large chain restaurants. She had a feeling she wasn’t alone and figured there would be strength in numbers, so seven years ago she started a collaborative program with other restaurateurs in the city.

“The original goal was to grow market share for independent restaurants and make them more profitable,” Radies says. “I found 10 or 11 others that got what I was trying to do. It worked, the businesses got busy and I started to get calls from people saying we need something like that for our industry.”

At first, Radies was hesitant. Her expertise was in the hospitality industry and the collaboration was started simply as a goal to increase revenue among local, independent restaurants. “Then I started to connect the dots,” she says. “Local businesses are part of a successful, resilient and innovative community. The picture got bigger for me and I realized there was opportunities for all local businesses.”

That original collaborative program morphed into Live Local. The not-for-profit organization launched in February 2010 in an effort to bring together groups and individuals who are committed to encouraging people to eat, dine and shop in local businesses. “I want local businesses to be successful because without them, communities can’t be successful,” Radies says.

While Live Local’s broad social goal is to support and develop sustainable and vibrant communities, the organization does it in three specific ways. The first is by selling food from local producers through an online store. As well as promoting local fare and supporting local farmers, producers and manufacturers, one per cent of the revenue generated by Live Local’s online sales goes to low income families.

The second is through a member program that offers gift cards and loyalty programs. “It’s similar to a chamber of commerce, but for small local businesses,” Radies says. “We help businesses work together and promote other local businesses.”

The third is to bring businesses together to offer perks for employees to help small businesses recruit and retain employees.

By fuelling the local economy, Radies hopes that the quality of life increases in the community, opportunities emerge and poverty is reduced.

“I think there’s a place for all businesses,” she says. “But people need to understand, so we can make proper choices and understand the benefits and costs of the decisions they make.”

Sage Savories

FAST FACTS

Website: http://www.sagesavories.ca/ordereze/1000/Page.aspx

Year Established: 2008

Social Goal: to provide seniors who have transportation and mobility issues with high quality, nutritional food in their homes

Number of Employees: 4

Number of Volunteers: 4 permanent volunteer roles

Volume of Ready-made Meals: average 1,500 per month

Sage is an Edmonton institution. The Seniors Association of Greater Edmonton has been around for more than 40 years, providing a wide range of programs and services designed to improve the quality of life for seniors. As well as offering health services, housing services, tax services and social services in Alberta’s capital city, Sage operates the Sunshine Cafe in downtown Edmonton.

“Clients were having difficulty meeting their daily food requirements,” says Karen McDonald, director of community relations with Sage. “They were coming to the cafe to order food and get an extra portion packaged up to take home.”

So, the not-for-profit organization created Sage Savories in 2008. “The idea was to provide access to quality food in the home for seniors who had mobility or transportation issues, or even food preparation issues,” McDonald says.

The line of Sage Savories was designed with consideration to lower sodium and lower fat content. The menu includes 18 different prepared and frozen meals, five different soups and six desserts. Many of the soups and meals are included in the Heart and Stroke Foundation Health Check program.

Sage also publishes an annual directory of seniors services. “There’s every service you could have for seniors and caregivers,” McDonald says.

The 260-page guide is delivered for free to more than 600 organizations in Edmonton and also available for free at a number of magazine racks throughout the region. The free service is made possible by selling ads.

“If the directory didn’t deliver results they wouldn’t advertise as a volunteer,” McDonald says.

That’s the biggest challenge, McDonald says, of operating a social enterprise – applying a business lens. While she spent 10 years in marketing in the for-profit sector, many social entrepreneurs don’t have the same corporate background and are more likely to focus on the social outcomes instead of the financial opportunities.

“You need to always think about applying that balance,” McDonald says.