In a complex community with wide-ranging perspectives and a deep history…
how do you drive systemic change for a positive future?
Approach
We create space and offer a process for connection, turning collective knowledge into action, and action into lasting change.
Catalytic Convenings
A better model for getting things done.
Our virtual-first approach brings the right experts into the room without the overhead of constant live meetings, saving time, reducing cost, and letting us move faster at greater scale.
Sponsor connections: We connect intrapreneurs with the philanthropists, investors, and corporate partners actively looking for proven, scalable approaches to fund and champion.
Changemaker Acceleration
Real change takes time. We design for that.
Change doesn't happen in a single meeting. It happens when a group builds trust, reaches consensus, and stays accountable to action over time. We build that arc into every program.
Build trust: We create space for the right people to connect repeatedly, not just once. Relationships are the foundation everything else is built on.
Reach consensus: Through structured collaboration, groups align on what matters, what's possible, and who does what, turning diverse perspectives into a shared path forward.
Stay on the path: We keep groups connected over time with touchpoints, milestones, and mutual accountability that prevent momentum from fading after the first meeting.
Deliver real results: The process ends in action: implemented solutions, scaled programs, and measurable change in the communities and systems that need it most.
Social Technology
Social technology built for the problems that matter most.
Well-designed platforms have transformed how we find a hotel, buy a car, or hail a ride. We apply that same thinking to community resilience — because preparing for wildfires, hurricanes, and drought deserves the same ingenuity.
Community Action
Accelerating innovators who tackle what matters.
We design and run accelerator programs for intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs working on important, systemic problems. With 1,000+ innovators and teams through our programs, we know how to move ideas to impact.
Wildfire & forest resilience: We bring together innovators working on forest fuel load reduction, help them build viable business plans, co-create shared markets, and connect them with sponsors to implement and scale their solutions.
Agrivoltaics consortiums: We identify collaborative business models that let solar developers, family farms, large off-takers, and local communities all win — preserving farmland, generating clean energy, and lowering costs for communities.
Our Theory of Change
We accelerate resilience and climate innovations
Our main tools are:
Convening to build common purpose, vision, or strategy
Processes for surfacing intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs with worthy ideas and helping them implement faster with accelerators and incubators.
The solutions to many of today’s most pressing challenges already exist, but they are not being implemented at the speed or scale required.
Innovera focuses on the barriers that prevent action. These barriers are often not technical, but social, institutional, and economic. We work to move communities and organizations past these constraints by aligning incentives, building capacity, and enabling coordinated action.
We believe that durable change happens when:
Communities are equipped and empowered to act on the risks they face
Solutions are aligned with real-world conditions and incentives
Systems are designed to work with natural processes, not against them
Capital is structured to support long-term resilience and shared value
Our work focuses on specific, high-impact challenges—such as wildfire risk, coastal resilience, and agrivoltaic systems—where local action can unlock broader system change.
By convening stakeholders, strengthening local agency, and aligning ecological, infrastructure, and economic systems, we help translate known solutions into scalable, replicable outcomes.
This approach is shaped by decades of experience across sustainability, systems change, data integrity, and community engagement. It reflects a belief shared by our leadership: meaningful progress happens when ideas are grounded in real-world conditions and scaled through collaboration.
Collaboration
We convene communities, organizations, institutions, and capital around shared outcomes. Our work is grounded in the belief that the knowledge and motivation needed for change are widely distributed across all stakeholders and that meaningful progress begins by bringing people together around shared challenges and opportunities.
Insight
We combine local knowledge with systems thinking and rigorous analysis to understand both the technical and social dimensions of complex challenges. This includes identifying the barriers—behavioral, institutional, and economic—that prevent known solutions from being implemented at scale. This is where opportunity becomes visible.
Innovation
We design integrated solutions that work across energy, water, food, forest, and economic systems. We focus on approaches that align with real-world incentives and have the potential to scale—prioritizing solutions that are both technically viable and economically durable.
Impact
We scale what works. By connecting credible data, aligned stakeholders, and investable models, we help unlock capital and coordinated action. Solutions developed in one context are designed to be adapted and replicated—extending impact across communities, landscapes, and systems.
Connection → Insight → Innovation → Impact
Change Process
Change takes time and work, but it can be accelerated by engaging the community in a systematic process that we call the “Pinchot Process,” building upon the experience of Gifford and Libba Pinchot in working with various types of organizations, communities, innovators and stakeholders. At the heart of this process are seven fundamental steps:
Convene diverse experts to explore solutions. We run an online thought leadership event, featuring best practices on a national or international level along with presentations about what has already been tried by the community or organization. This helps us develop a deeper understanding of the opportunities while building credibility and a relationship with key stakeholders, showing them how we create constructive dialogue and a focus on solutions. Our goal is to honor the work that has already been done while exploring innovations applied in other contexts, establishing a broader perspective and hope that new solutions can be successful.
Meet individually with key stakeholders. We deploy a structured interview to systematically explore the insight and desires of various community stakeholders, while briefing these stakeholders on our suggested process. The result is that we get to know people, their thoughts and concerns while building a picture of what the community has already done and may need to do in the future.
Develop mindshare about the process and desired outcomes. Leveraging the data from the two prior steps, we work with top leaders to outline a process that they can buy into, while articulating what we’re trying to achieve. In general, our goals are prosperity, risk mitigation and enhanced community capacity (stronger relationships, better process, greater confidence).
Idea Fair & Evaluation. We recruit various local experts to briefly pitch their ideas, while engaging the audience in evaluating the practicality and scalability of these ideas. Ultimately, we help the community choose a small number of solutions to pursue. The result is that solutions are “owned” by the community, generated “bottom up,” and these solutions are quicky vetted — the community can focus limited resources on the best bets.
Sponsor / Champion Selection and Guidance. We coach top leaders in ways to support the innovators in their organization or community, helping to create a positive culture for innovation. We teach sponsors about the entrepreneurial personality, how some people bring value because they are willing to try and fail, rapidly producing meaningful insight for the organization. The goals is to help the organization become more effective in promoting solutions, more tolerant of changemakers.
Solution Acceleration / Execution We systematically accelerate the development and execution of solutions, providing a process and ongoing guidance that protects change makers while creating a spirit of collaboration among innovators and their sponsors. Over time, we help to monitor projects to keep them on track.
Action Learning We periodically reconvene leaders to examine what we’re all learning and how we can improve. In our minds, progress is learning — innovators need to be extracting and sharing what they are learning, for the benefit of the entire organization or community. The result is that employees or community members experience forward progress and develop confidence that they can collectively solve problems in the future.