By Tom Braford
Come join us as we create an innovation-based, live-in/work-in citizen scientist community of practice
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
– Buckminster Fuller
At Arizmendi Ecovillage, we are out to build a better model based on the latest physical and social innovations, because the future depends on it.
Years ago, a financial technological innovation was used by the nation state of Singapore called Sovereign Technology Credit Obligation (STCO). Invented by an American Dr. David Martin and his data mining and innovation based enterprise, M-CAM, it is based on the fact that they were able to predict, not just future value of switching to more efficient and synergistic ways and means of doing things, but also the optimized rate of upgrades.
This is essentially how utility companies find investors to finance their operations except that they get hung up on the idea of stranded assets and try to squeeze every last dime out of original investments, rather than being flexible and letting the dollars flow. Singapore raised the return on investment of their sovereign wealth fund from 6 to 10% a year by shifting to a nimbler approach.
We are considering creating an Innovation Community Sovereign Wealth Fund at Arizmendi Ecovillage that could eventually be funded internally by Ecovillage and its co-op businesses. We may initially need some social and environmental impact investing to fill an early gap in funding, but that could be covered entirely by late stage R&D funding that qualifies for a 100% federal tax credit. That funding could move the prototype to the commercialization stage research. We are currently applying for grants from the Department of Energy for research on late stage photovoltaic solar innovations and thermal solar in combination with ground based seasonal heat storage, as well as one from the National Science Foundation to study a suit of breakthrough social technologies.
We will, of course, run this idea by M-CAM, but if you have some expertise that would be useful in beginning to structure such a fund or would like to get involved in this opportunity in other ways, please contact us.
Contact: braford@sbcglobal.net
www.ArizmendiEcovillage.com