For most of 2012, much of my focus and energy went into creating the concept for my next big project and forming a startup company that will carry it out. It’s called Reinventors, and what follows is the simple one-page description:
Reinventors is a series of virtual roundtables done over the new medium of group video about how to fundamentally reinvent many of our 20th-century systems to work in the new realities of our 21st-century world.
Each session starts with an anchor interview of a remarkable “reinventor” who lays out his or her ideas on how to fundamentally reinvent a field, and that flows into a roundtable discussion with other experts and innovators who can build off those ideas. The whole video conversation is streamed to a live audience through the web.
Reinvent America is the inaugural project that will launch in early 2013 and look at how to fundamentally reinvent America across many fields. How do we reinvent areas like energy or education or food production, or rethink how to handle privacy or copyright or patents? How can we help the country make the transition to the all-digital, fully global, more sustainable world of the coming decades and take on the huge challenges that lie ahead?
Reinventors will be building a network of innovators at several levels as we draw people into this important conversation. There are the remarkable reinventors, the unusually creative thinkers who deeply understand the forces shaping the future like new technologies and will spark the conversations. There also are the roundtable reinventors who are an eclectic mix of experts and innovators who bring some useful knowledge or talent to the table. Then we expect a significant part of the audience eventually will be engaged in the real-time conversations and in building off the ideas roughed out in the roundtables. They are reinventors too.
All our efforts take advantage of the incredible power of the new medium of interactive group video. We use Google’s group video platform or ”hangouts,” the most robust and open platform out there, to easily connect up to 10 people in complex conversations through their own computers from wherever they are. This is a game-changing capability with many potential uses that will only get better with time.
Reinventors Network is the formal name for the company making this all happen. We’re a startup on the Silicon Valley model, with early investors, and a business model that we believe not only can sustain the conversations but scale them up over time. Our mission is to help reinvent America and transform the world by cracking new ways to accelerate reinvention across many different topics and regions in the years ahead.
Check out the new website at www.reinventors.net to see the lineup of the top-tier Reinventors like Tim O’Reilly and Michael Pollan and what areas of America they want to reinvent. You can also get much more on the framework for the conversations and why we see America now entering a period of explosive innovation. You can also watch videos that explain the new series and the opportunity for transformative change opening up.
We’re interested in talking to a couple more investors, some founding sponsors, and anyone who considers themselves a reinventor and wants to get involved in the conversations to come. You can find out more at www.reinventors.net. For now you can contact me through this website.
