John Mac McQuown Climate Innovation Lab

An innovation lab facilitates development and creates public value through small-scale experimentation and solution testing. The POP Movement proudly announces the launch of the John "Mac" McQuown Climate Innovation Lab.

The John "Mac" McQuown Climate Innovation Lab’s core activities include:

1. Climate and sustainable development exploration and research
2. Ideation and solution scoping
3. Proof of concept through small-scale testing and experimentation
4. Impact evaluation to determine whenever the solution is worth scaling up

The innovation lab works earnestly to improve its own capacities to keep up and lead local development. In order to accomplish that, the John "Mac" McQuown Climate Innovation Lab captures and shares knowledge about emerging technologies and trends, hones its design and experimentation tool by applying robust research methodology and engages new stakeholders by building partnerships and co-opting unique actors to implement innovative solutions. Annually a select innovation will be awarded the John "Mac" McQuown award.

Defining Features

The following defining characteristics are important to provide practitioners, innovators, and scholars with a more-nuanced snapshot of what the John "Mac" McQuown Climate Innovation Lab is about.

The John "Mac" McQuown Climate Innovation Lab aims to:

• Create breakthroughs, out-of-the-box solutions to major climate and sustainable development challenges of the present and the future.
• Pursue disruptive innovations calling “imagine the impossible” and “translate today’s moonshots into tomorrow’s breakthroughs”.
• Engage a wide range of participants, cutting across the boundaries of industries, professions, and cultures.
  Bring together a unique and diverse group of people (e.g., indigenous, coastal, vulnerable, and marginalized communities), that would otherwise not work together.
• Be a “vehicle for discovering the future” which encourages blue sky thinking, strategic planning, horizontal scanning, and foresight scenarios.
• Encourage a wide range of methods and tools to stimulate creativity, guide discussions, moderate collaboration, as well as develop, prototype, and experiment solutions.
• Permit experimentation, thereby, allowing innovators to try things out on a small scale, prototype, test and accept failure as part of progress, and re-invent methods and approaches in the process of achieving success.
• Promote systemic thinking and collaboration for the purpose of creating, elaborating, and prototyping radical solutions to pre-identified systemic challenges.
• Develop tangible solutions, not just ideas, and therefore the John "Mac" McQuown Climate Innovation Lab seeks to remain active throughout the innovation process, going beyond the ideation stage where possible.