Redefining the Narrative: Taking Control of Our Future and Climate Change

Building the Future through Circular and Green Innovation was the topic of my talk in Ljubliana, Slovenia this last week. The event was hosted by the Regional Development Agency of Ljubliana urban region. I was delighted to be invited to talk about something that I spend a lot of time thinking about and investing in founders working on these solutions. The organization of the event was excellent and I enjoyed all the other speakers and discussions.

This is a smaller deck of a presentation that I give to my students in Reykjavik University. Building the future that we want to see is not a given. I was probably a contrarian in that room as I was suggesting that small groups of people who are mission driven are more likely to change the trajectory of the future than any government or institutional policy. I am not saying those institutions are not important, they are very important but if we look through the arc of history it has always been a small group of people who utilized their ingenuity to invent new technology to change the course of the future. I think we need to get back to that way of thinking and get back to being optimistic about the future.

Changing the narrative

As you can see that I am back to blogging, the narratives and conversations that we are seeing in the social media and the main stream media are all just horrible. I cannot believe we have allowed these platforms to hijack our future through their doom scrolls and fearmongering narratives. Yes, I understand Blood on the street sells newspapers but we need to take control of our own attention to these exaggerated headlines. Yes, climate is changing, so what are we going to do about it? that was the question that I was posting to the audience, that is also the question I post to my students. If you don’t like what is happening then do something about it. Work on an idea that can make a meaningful difference.

3 Examples of teams working on Sustainability solutions

I showed examples of 3 ideas and founders who we have backed to give some context to the problem. The first one is Armann Kojic who is the CEO of NanOm, a nano particles company that is imagining a way forward for energy storage. If you did not see the AWS – Now.Go.Build Series in Amazon Prime here is a short video explaining what Nanom is working on…

The 2nd Example is the company founded by student from Reykjavik University, Julie Encasso. The name of the company is Marea. This company is building new bio material from Algae waste to make food coating that keeps vegetables and fruits fresh without plastic covering for 23 days (lab tests so far).

The 3rd company is Humble that is working on a marketplace to reduce food waste in the entire food supply chain. They work with everyone in the food supply chain and ensure that food does not go to waste. Here is a short video explaining this, if you have not downloaded the Humble App (iOS or Android) you should.