An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 2)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: Can students apply to your incubator?

Debera: They cannot be students. They have to have graduated. I don’t want to interfere with their education. So, we take people either when they’ve just graduated, who we feel have the ability and are energized and smart and have the characteristics of an entrepreneur and are willing to take it on and learn a lot and work hard.

What we do is we give them a space and some structure about how to write business plans, how to think about being an entrepreneur. What are the things that you need to make decisions about as an entrepreneur? At the same time, they’re developing their ideas.

Often, they come in with a concept and they think the concept is a company. The concept is really just an expression of the company that they want to run. So, they have to step back a little and say, “OK, well, if I’ve designed this product, and it’s beautiful and wonderful, and I think it’s going to sell.” That’s not enough to make company out of.

You need to think about what the next product is What are the extensions on that product line? How is this going to go into that next step? They haven’t thought so much about, “What’s my idea for a company?” They’ve mostly thought about, “Oh, I’ve got this great product, and I want to make a company.”

Irina: If you would imagine an ideal company that would benefit from your incubator, what would it be?

Debera: Sure. I think a couple of the people that we’ve just accepted [are examples]. There’s a company called the twentyten. It’s a fashion design company that’s interested in creating fashion designs that are Earth friendly, use local labor and, where possible, materials that are as local as possible or recycled or found materials.

They graduated last May. They’re incredibly entrepreneurial. They’re out there working hard. They really want to make it happen.

I think that’s an ideal company because New York, obviously, has a huge fashion sector. So, it sits well within the context of the city.

It’s a combination of understanding what can be manufactured. What’s the manufacturing base of Brooklyn? Does it tap into an existing manufacturing base or reasonably local manufacturing base?

We have things from fashion design to photovoltaic design to a new company that’s just come in that’s doing modular biogases.

We have two fashion design companies. We have furniture and household goods companies that manufacture here, locally, in Brooklyn.

We have a photovoltaic company that does solar energy systems, as well as a modular biogas system that takes compost and turns it into fuel. Usually, these systems are quite large. This is a smaller system that might work for an apartment building.

We have engineers. We have designers. The engineers use the skills of the designers. The designers are interested in what the engineers are doing. There’s a lot of dialog among our companies. We meet every three weeks to talk about what’s going on, to help each other problem-solve, to help each other think about how to [do something].

You have to make a lot of compromises when you’re working in the sustainability realm. When is it green enough? What’s the right decision? It’s uncharted territory, for the most part.

That’s why I wanted to create the incubator. It’s hard enough to start a company. It’s probably twice as hard to start a company where you have to make compromises and price decisions that include thinking about the social impact and the environmental impact.

If you don’t care about how much you pollute, it’s easy to make money. When you really care about that, it’s much more difficult. So, my goal is to create replicable models for other businesses to say, “Now, you can have a profitable business and still be in this territory. Here’s how. Look how it’s done.”

I think it’s our responsibility, as an educational institution. I feel like we’re on moon gravity, versus Earth gravity. We don’t have overheads like other people do. So, we have a responsibility, as an educational institution, to try to create new models, to be saying, “This is what the future is.”

This segment is part 2 in the series : An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation
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