Breakthrough Innovation Is Our Calling

Our team works to facilitate the development of breakthrough innovation projects, and to get them funded. We most often do this with a method we've come to affectionately refer to as a Sandpit.

What Is a Sandpit?

A Sandpit is an intensive, interactive workshop designed to produce radically innovative project proposals.

Participants, from a diverse range of disciplines, domains, and perspectives come together in a creative, free-thinking environment - away from their every day routines and responsibilities - and are invited to immerse themselves deeply in a collaborative process around an important challenge.

The event itself is usually a 5-day residential program that follows a relatively structured process. Typically, 35 to 70 participants are invited, from different organizations and areas of expertise. Over the course of the week, the group works to deepen their shared understanding of the designated challenge, to redefine the problems within the challenge and to generate novel project ideas that are peer reviewed on the spot.

Our Sandpits (also known as Ideas Labs) have led to hundreds of millions of dollars in scientific research awards over the years, as well as a variety of white papers, policy and industry recommendations, direct action projects, entrepreneurial ventures, and enterprise innovation projects.

A Brief List of Sandpits From Years Past

EarthCube

We designed and facilitated a series of workshops, webinars, and behind the scenes activities that erected the EarthCube project.

EarthCube is a collaboration between the U.S. National Science Foundation and Earth, atmosphere, ocean, computer, data, and social scientists, educators, statisticians, archeologiest, and more. EarthCube aims to transform the conduct of research through the development of community-guided cyberinfrastructure to integrate information and data across the geosciences.

It is an incredible community! You can learn more at EarthCube.org

The Ocean Observatories Initative

The Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) is an integrated infrastructure program composed of science-driven platforms and sensor systems that measure physical, chemical, geological and biological properties and processes from the seafloor to the air-sea interface. The data it collects across over 900 sensors at 7 locations across our oceans flow in real time.

The program is funded by the National Science Foundation, and we a workshop to help the leadership team adapt the project to changing environmental factors.

Learn more at OceanObservatories.org

Innovation Tournaments for Enterprise Innovators

We designed and facilitated an Innovation Tournment for a large technology company that produced innovation projects that targeted cost reduction, product improvments, new product develpoment, and more.

Participants formed teams and raced through review panels and working sessions. They generated breakthrough ideas, composed financial models, and pitched to their directors. They received critical feedback, struggled and shined through leadership and teamwork interventions, and learned about how to innovate in their organization by rolling up their sleeves and doing the hard work of developing innovation projects.

Computational Skills in Life Sciences

These days, great biologists need to have strong computational skills. So how do you go about getting more math into biology or, for that matter, more mathematicians doing biology? These, and other questions, were answered by an inspiring group of scientists and educators at the National Conference Centre during our Sandpit with them.

Improving Public Health Policy with the National Cancer Institute

Is the cure to cancer hidden where we haven't been looking... and what do we do until a medical cure is developed? Policy and other population-level strategies play a critical role. A cigarette tax creates a measurable decrease in lung cancer cases, but not for everyone in the population. In this Sandpit, we guided scientists from across disciplines (psychology, economics, policy, and more) to make policies and population-level approaches smarter and more targeted, and to reduce risk to cancer across the population.

Rethinking Biosignatures in the Search for Life Beyond Earth

How do you find something when you don't know what it looks like or what it's made of? This is part of the mystery of searching for life beyond the Earth, and an essential step in answering one of the oldest questions in history: Are we alone in the universe? We worked with a group of NASA scientists to think beyond the current approaches and considerations of biosignatures in the search for life beyond Earth.

It is our passion, and by some cosmic coincidence our job, to help scientists and others think more creatively in order to solve large, wicked problems. We love what we do very much, and hope you'll join us.