Hello @William_COACT, nice to meet you. My name is Alberto, one of the old hands here at Edgeryders. Your space looks beautiful and inspiring!
I have a question, and my apologies if it sounds a bit thorny. I have the impression that a lot of the innovation really worth doing tends to destroy GDP, not increase it, and in general to be bad for capitalism (not to put too fine a point on it). Environmental innovation is not the only type of innovation where I see this, but it is where this effect seems strongest. I write this under the influence of the Deep Adaptation paper, where Bendell essentially says that sustainability is over. We are now in the age of adaptation, and the three directions of work for adaptation are resilience, relinquishment and restoration. Relinquishment is particularly important: maybe the most impactful environmental innovation is going to come from giving up stuff (private cars, commercial aviation, most meat).
Not buying things is infinitely scalable, but it generates economic benefit from public goods (like the natural environment) instead of market transactions. Public goods are famously difficult to monetize, which adds further efficiency because just letting people enjoy them is very cheap and (again) scalable, but, in my experience, they are not a direction that incubators, VCs etc. like to take. They like “sustainable”, which is mostly business as usual.
I am curious: how does this tension play out at COACT? How do you yourself see it?