An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation (Part 5)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What other business development tools do you use?

Debera: There are lots of tools for developing business plans. We use those. That’s fairly structured. Then, around [such tools] is the fairly chaotic experience of the other people in the incubator as well as all the mentors we have.

So, if somebody comes to me and says, “We’re looking to package this product, and we really don’t know how to go about that,” I’ll call Susan Scior or Wendy Jedlicka, who are packaging experts, and say, “Hey, can you talk to these people for an hour?” And they say, “Sure.”

So, you get great expertise, as needed, from people who want to participate in helping people to start these businesses. They believe in the vision I have, which is to create business models that are based on sustainable practices. They’re just willing to give us time.

Irina: What do you see as your metrics of success?

Debera: We want to create businesses that are based on sustainable, triple-bottom-line thinking – where we measure and value the environmental and social impacts as well as profit and loss. So, if our businesses succeed on that level, that’s important to us.

What we’re hoping to do is speed [up] that process, so we’re creating structures that we hope will make people succeed or fail more quickly.

Again, if we can model best practices for sustainability, we’re happy. The fact that we have 12 businesses out there, that are still out there operating, is pretty great. We just want to make more of them. For me, it’s a world built on businesses that use sustainability as their metric.

Irina: Can you name some of your successes?

Debera: One of our biggest successes is something called Kurgo. They make pet products. They are really interested in healthy dogs and healthy lifestyles. They don’t talk about being green, but behind the scenes, they are clear about the products they are creating, the materials they are using.

They’re a $3 million company. I think they’re the fastest-growing pet company in the nation at the moment. They were just listed in Forbes. That’s one.

Another is SMIT. They’re a photovoltaic company. Right now they’re doing a lot of custom installations. Their goal is to create something that’s a bit more mass marketable for people.

They’re doing solar panels. But they’re not really panels. They’re actually like ivy leaves that go on vertical surfaces instead of on horizontal surfaces. It’s a beautiful product, and it’s in the Museum of Modern Art’s design collection. They’re doing really well.

They officially came in, in 2006. They’re still in the Navy Yard space, but they’ve started to actually rent space from us. That was about a year ago.

So, they were in the incubator for four years. The first company came in 2003. They left in 2004. We gave them just a year in the space. They’re such wonderful people.

I know them as students. I come at this as an educator: This is about creating people whom you really want out in the world making things happen. I adore them. I’m just so passionate about them. For me, that’s my metric, a very personal one. This is what I choose to do. It’s the enthusiasm and passion and my own sense of being an entrepreneur. It’s great. It makes me feel good that these people are just so wonderful.

The other part of the incubator is the consultancy. We do projects that are based on, again, the values of sustainability, only for other people. Sometimes it’s for profit. Sometimes it’s not for profit.

We’ve done amazing projects. We’re about to do a project in Haiti, I’m hoping. We go into low-resource areas and use design to improve outcomes around health care, usually. Or we’ll do for-profit projects like we did for West Elm, which is a furniture company, to design a sustainable home office.

We’ll bring together a group of 12 fabulously gifted, just graduated, people to work on this project. They end up not only with a produced product that they can point to and say, “Hey, I designed that,” but they now know how to design sustainably, and they can bring that to their next job.

Sustainability, on some level, should be invisible. You should just love it and want it, whatever that product is, whatever that service is. The fact that it’s been thought through in terms of environmental consequences, you should find out later. Your first interest in the product should be like the interest you have for any other product.

This segment is part 5 in the series : An Interview With Debera Johnson, Founder And Executive Director, Pratt Design Incubator For Sustainable Innovation
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