365 Sustainable Innovation Challenge

---

The 365 Sustainable Innovation Challenge began as a personal experiment: to create one sustainability innovation concept every day until I reached 365. I started on May 24, 2023 and completed the final concept on January 28, 2025. What I expected to take one year took 616 days.

The concepts moved across energy, water, food, materials, manufacturing, biodiversity, AI, cities, and other systems shaping life on Earth. Some began with a problem. Others started with a material, a biological mechanism, an observation, or something I encountered in ordinary life.

I came to the challenge from years of building in cleantech, design, engineering, and manufacturing, but also from endurance sport. I was curious about what might happen if inventiveness were treated less like a moment of inspiration and more like a capacity that could be practiced over a long period of time. That became the more important part of the experiment.

The early concepts showed me where my own imagination tended to begin. As the practice continued, I became more aware of the assumptions I was carrying into invention, the questions I was not yet asking, and how much further an idea could be pushed after the first plausible solution appeared.

The Challenge eventually became the foundation of Imagine Next, but the book is not simply a collection of the original 365 concepts. I returned to them through deeper research, prior-art analysis, feasibility review, and repeated reinvention. Many changed substantially.

What emerged was not only an Atlas of ideas, but a method for practicing inventiveness itself—and a larger question that now sits underneath my work:

What deserves to exist next?

I started the Sustainable Innovation Challenge on May 24, 2023.

The Challenge started with a question that had been bothering me for some time: why, despite having more knowledge, research, and technological capability than ever, do genuinely disruptive ideas still seem so rare? Around that time, I came across research pointing to the same paradox—the growth of scientific knowledge alongside a decline in disruptive breakthroughs. It stayed with me.

I had spent years working across clean energy, startups, design, engineering, and innovation ecosystems. I also knew from endurance sports that capacity changes through repetition. You do not begin a marathon or an Ironman with the body you have at the finish. You train into it.

I began wondering whether imagination might work in a similar way.

Could inventiveness be practiced deliberately? Could I train myself to notice possibilities I would normally pass by, and keep pushing after the first plausible idea appeared?

The 365 Sustainable Innovation Challenge became my way of finding out.

During the Challenge, I documented concepts across Instagram, Evernote, Google Drive, and my website. For a long time, I shared much of the work publicly as it developed.

Eventually, I archived some of it, temporarily or permanently.

There were two reasons. First, as my own standards for originality became more rigorous, I could see that some early concepts were still too close to existing ideas. I wanted the public record to reflect that evolution rather than present every first version as equally resolved.

Second, I repeatedly found ideas and mechanisms I had shared openly appearing later in research papers, white papers, and even patent-related work without attribution. A few people contacted me and asked permission or cited the source. Many did not.

That changed how I think about publishing work in progress. I still believe in sharing ideas, but I am now more deliberate about what I release publicly, when I release it, and whether a concept has been sufficiently researched and developed first.

Many of the Challenge concepts were later revisited and substantially reworked for Imagine Next.

The concepts were not generated by AI.

What I was training during the Challenge was the human part of the process: noticing something that might otherwise pass unnoticed, catching it before it disappeared, and staying with it long enough for a question or possibility to form. Sometimes the spark came from a problem. Just as often it came from a material, a biological mechanism, a conversation, an object, something I saw while walking, or an unexpected connection between fields. I recorded these sparks constantly and returned to them later.

Research came after that. I used scientific papers, patents, industry knowledge, conversations with people in different fields, and, increasingly, AI tools to help investigate what already existed, test assumptions, and develop an idea further. But AI could not decide what was worth noticing in the first place, or which assumptions I wanted to question.

Over hundreds of repetitions, the process changed me. I became faster at recognizing potentially useful possibilities, but also less satisfied with the first idea that appeared. What initially felt original often turned out, after research, to have close precedents. That forced me to go further.

This practice eventually became the basis for the Inventiveness Ignition Loop described in Imagine Next. Its purpose is not to teach people how to generate more ideas. It is to strengthen the capacity to notice, question, investigate, test, and keep moving beyond the obvious.

The decision grew out of something much earlier.

About a decade before the Challenge, I spent a year trying to live as sustainably as I realistically could. It was a personal experiment, but it quickly became an education in how many everyday systems still made sustainable choices unnecessarily difficult. By then, I had already spent years helping build renewable-energy and cleantech markets in Ukraine and across Central and Eastern Europe and Central Asia. I had worked across policy, industry development, startups, and technology, and had seen both how much innovation can change a system and how often the same assumptions keep reproducing themselves.

That personal experiment led me more deeply into product development. I created an organic clothing line, then moved into sustainable manufacturing, including 3D-printed fashion and later experiments with fully digital production and delivery through Imageneria.

Over time, I became less interested in improving isolated products and more interested in the deeper question behind them: how many better possibilities are we simply failing to imagine?

The 365 Sustainable Innovation Challenge came from that question. I wanted to make invention a daily practice and see what would happen if I kept pushing it for long enough.

For me, an innovation concept is an early but structured possibility. It is not yet a finished product, business, or research result. It is a way of asking whether something different could exist, how it might work, and what would have to be true for it to become real.

Sustainable innovation is innovation that considers consequences beyond immediate usefulness or commercial success. It asks what a new product, technology, system, or policy does to energy, materials, ecosystems, people, and the systems around it over time.

I increasingly think even “sustainable” is not enough. Some systems should not merely be sustained. The more important question is whether an innovation helps the larger living systems it depends on continue, recover, or become more resilient.

A sustainable innovation concept is therefore an early proposition developed with both inventiveness and consequence in mind. It may be technological, systemic, material, biological, social, or some combination of these. At this stage, the goal is not to pretend that every answer is already known. It is to make a possibility concrete enough to investigate, challenge, research, and develop further.

That is the territory of the 365 Sustainable Innovation Challenge.

The Challenge was built around a disciplined practice of moving beyond the first plausible idea.

The goal was not simply to create concepts, but to reach areas where existing solutions, assumptions, and categories begin to thin out, and something genuinely different may become possible.

Research is essential to that process. It reveals what already exists, where similar ideas have appeared, which assumptions are inherited, and where an apparently original concept is still operating inside a familiar frame. But finding white space is only part of the work.

Behind invention sits a deeper question: what kind of world are these inventions collectively building? The philosophy you begin with changes what you notice: problems, possibilities, consequences, questions you think to ask in the first place. As that underlying frame becomes more conscious, the field of possibility changes too. 

The 365 Sustainable Innovation Challenge became a practice of doing exactly that: researching what exists, testing the boundaries of existing thinking, and repeatedly trying to move beyond them.

The fuller methodology that emerged from this practice became part of Imagine Next.

During the Challenge, I often shared the first version of a concept I could develop within a single day. Those early iterations were part of the practice, not final claims of originality.

While working on Imagine Next, I returned to every concept with deeper research, prior-art analysis, and a much higher standard for what counted as genuinely distinctive. Some remained close to their original form. Many changed substantially. Others had to be questioned from the beginning and rebuilt.

In fast-moving fields, independent ideas can converge, and some concepts I explored later appeared in related forms elsewhere. What matters to me is not claiming every first sketch as unprecedented, but continuing to push the work until the underlying question, mechanism, or system moves beyond what is already familiar. The book reflects that later stage of the process.