The San Diego Incubator for Innovation embodies a commitment to multidisciplinary collaboration and cultivating creativity.
The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership hosts the incubator, celebrating a wide variety of community partners as promoters of innovation.
Situated in a hotbed of innovation across a broad spectrum of industries and disciplines, the incubator brings unique resources to San Diego’s binational community:
- a year-long fellowship for 100 people to enhance their innovation skills through intelligent integration of the arts;
- unique linkages across multiple sectors in the US, Mexico, and tribal communities—industry, business, formal and informal education, research, government, arts and culture;
- extending and strengthening San Diego’s regional network of effective innovators and entrepreneurs;
- a structure to bring to fruition ten new water-related innovations;
- public events that actively engage people in processes of innovation, using the arts to explore and create in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
The San Diego Incubator for Innovation will launch on October 12, 2013 and run through September 2014.
Crowd-sourcing, community input, and a public vote led to the selection of a STEM-related challenge to galvanize the incubator’s efforts—Water, and the mismatch between regional supply and demand. The incubator’s innovation teams will be creating and developing solutions to water-related issues.
The San Diego AoSL team recruited actively to build a strong group of participants, reaching out to many disciplines and roles within the community:
- engineers, scientists, technology developers ;
- visual and performing artists, teaching artists, curators;
- K-12 classroom teachers, college and university educators;
- museum professionals and informal educators;
- high school and college students;
- architects, designers, land planners, geographers;
- policy makers, military, and business leaders;
- people with expertise in water issues.
The San Diego Art of Science Learning Innovation Fellows—100 community members diverse in expertise, life experience, and age—will participate in a series of workshops focused on innovation process (targeting opportunities, generating solutions, new product development and testing, market and business planning, seeking investment) and innovation skills (creativity, communication, collaboration). They will organize into teams around the ten best ideas for innovative products, services, and/or educational programs, and develop those ideas to move them to market.
Public engagement events center on the following themes:
- Education Innovations
- Making and Prototyping
- Meeting the Market
- Water in Our Region.
Stay tuned for the San Diego AoSL event calendar.
The San Diego Incubator for Innovation derives strength from numerous advisors, supporters, friends, and community partners.
