I Produced One Sustainable Innovation Concept Every Day, for One Year…
… here’s what I learned after 365 days.
The trigger was frustration rooted in data. By 2023, only 15% of the UN Sustainable Development Goals were on track (UNISEF, 2023). Patent analysis showed that while one-third of inventions relate loosely to sustainability, many domains critical to survival remain neglected (WIPO, 2024). And far too often, ‘sustainability’ collapsed into shallow branding or outright greenwashing. A 2021 investigation by the European Commission analyzed 344 sustainability claims across sectors: 59% provided no supporting evidence, and 42% were judged as false or deceptive (European Commission, 2021).
For someone with a background in clean tech, and a former board member of the Association of Alternative Fuel and Energy Market Participants (APEU), this felt like wasted human potential. I had seen first-hand how “impossible” ideas could transform into lifelines.
So, after realizing that only 15% of the world’s sustainability goals were on track, I made a promise: I would produce one sustainable innovation concept daily for a year. I called it my Sustainable Innovation Challenge. In practice, it became an inquiry into how we see, think, and build and into why the world struggles to innovate where it matters most. Here’s what I learned:
A Lesson From Ukraine
In 2011, as a board member of APEU — which represented about 75% of Ukraine’s clean energy market — I co-initiated the effort to open the solar energy market to households. At the same time, I was Executive Director of the Innovative Business Centre (where besides consulting, we also engineered some of the very first and ambitious renewable energy infrastructure projects in the region), sat on the Expert Committee at the Ministry of Environmental Resources, and from 2012 served as Vice-President of the Public Council of the State Agency for Energy Efficiency and Energy Saving. These roles gave me a front-row seat to how fragile but transformative new ideas can be.
Later, I began co-founding climate-tech startups, which gave me a complementary perspective from the entrepreneurial side of the ecosystem.
What sounded improbable in 2011 became law in 2015, triggering exponential growth in Ukraine’s household solar market and empowering thousands of families. It strengthened the middle class and, when the full-scale war began, its true potential became visible. Distributed solar, enabled by that law, kept homes, schools, and hospitals alive when centralized grids were destroyed. What had once been dismissed as unrealistic became a literal belt of survival.
That experience framed my Challenge. If improbable ideas could one day prove essential, then perhaps our greatest crisis is not a lack of solutions, but a failure to imagine and refine them early enough.
My Methodology
From the outset, my Sustainable Innovation Challenge was not just casual brainstorming. Every day, I adhered to the following five-step process:
- Identify a concrete sustainability or systems problem.
2. Research current solutions across papers, patents, and markets.
3. Find the gaps.
4. Reflect on ways to address them (rooted in my technology knowledge x long-lasting background in design thinking).
5. Develop the idea into a structured innovation concept, with a visual sketch.
I promised myself that I would create 365 innovation concepts in 365 days. But after a year, I had reached only 282. The pace was more demanding than I had imagined. Instead of abandoning the challenge, I extended it, determined to reach the full number. It ultimately took me 616 days (from May 24, 2023 to January 28, 2025) to complete all 365 concepts.
That atlas of concepts, each aligned with at least one Sustainable Development Goal, will be published in 2025 as Imagine Next, the Atlas of 365 Innovation Concepts for a Regenerative World.
Prototypes for the Possible
Let me give you a glimpse of the concepts from my Sustainable Innovation Challenge. Some could be startups, others might inspire scientific research or policy shifts. A few are highly practical, while others are visionary, but all of them were designed to contribute to at least one Sustainable Development Goal. For me, the livability of any concept is only proven through contact with reality, iteration, and testing until something like a true “product-market fit” emerges.
Take one of my concepts in the energy field: solar power is constrained by the day-night cycle, clouds, and seasonal variation. I began by looking at the Moon’s synchronization with Earth but soon realized a more practical path — orbital reflectors. The SOLAR-REM Constellation concept envisions a fleet of lightweight mirrors in low Earth orbit that extend the output of existing solar farms by 30-120 minutes per day and AI-driven to respond to grid needs at scale. It smooths energy generation and demand intermittency without trillion-dollar new infrastructure. The 1993 Znamya experiment (Smithsonian Magazine, 2016) showed reflection was possible, and today startups like Reflect Orbital are probing the field. What’s missing in today’s orbital solar concepts is fleet-scale precision: the ability to dynamically target real grids and substitute for storage at critical peaks, and SOLAR-REM aims to close that gap.
Another day, another concept. FoamForma: a method that sprays mineral-based foam over lightweight molds, curing into fire-resistant, low-carbon shells in hours instead of weeks, while opening new freedom in form and design. The construction sector is one of the world’s most stubborn sources of emissions, often slow to change and resistant to rethinking methods. Through my exploration, I kept returning to the gaps in how we build and the urgency of shifting from carbon-intensive practices to planet-positive ones. Some of my concepts focus on this space, proposing new approaches that combine speed, resilience, and sustainability.
Climate resilience became a major focus across my concepts, too. One of them, CryoShield Habitat, was inspired by how trees both cool and char to survive. Unbearable heatwaves are intensifying worldwide, and they are only one of many climate extremes we must build resilience against. My concept integrated hidden cooling channels with fireproof layers to create a climate-safe refuge room, a space designed to shield people from both extreme heat and wildfires.
Another group of my concepts focused on food, rethinking how we nourish people in ways that are both planet- and human-friendly. At first, I asked a simple but radical question: could nutrition be delivered through the skin rather than through food alone? As I researched, I discovered gaps but also proofs of possibility: vitamin patches already existed for athletes. That insight led me to the VitaFuel Patch concept solving malnutrition, a transdermal system delivering essential nutrients steadily through the skin, designed for humanitarian crises.
Creating some of the very first sustainable 3D-printed clothing collections, receiving the first patent-pending in 3D printing for sustainability in garment manufacturing (2018), I devoted a portion of the concepts to rethinking not just how clothing is made, but how it is delivered and how it can serve us in the future. One of the concepts in this direction is AquaGuard FloodSuit: everyday apparel engineered for a world where climate-driven flooding is becoming routine. Beneath its sculptural surface lie survival-grade systems for waterproofing, insulation, and buoyancy, turning daily wear into resilience gear.
But more important than the concepts themselves were the side effects: how the rigour of daily innovation rewired my perception.
Side Effects of a Daily Sustainable Innovation Challenge
- There’s Inspiration Everywhere
You begin to see ideas emerging from every corner of life: a phrase in a meeting, a broken device, a child’s question. What once felt ordinary becomes charged with possibility. Research on creativity confirms this shift: exposure to diverse, seemingly unrelated stimuli is strongly correlated with divergent thinking, the ability to generate novel solutions (Runco & Acar, 2012). Immersed in daily innovation practice, your brain becomes tuned to treat the world not as background, but as raw material for imagination.
2. Outrunning the Canon
Sometimes you share a concept in a high-level setting, and people nod politely as if it’s familiar. Later you discover it exists neither in published science nor even on the internet. At first this feels disorienting, then you realize it’s a sign of having stepped beyond the established canon. Research shows that people often overestimate their understanding of new or complex ideas, a bias known as the illusion of explanatory depth (Rozenblit & Keil, 2002). In daily innovation practice, you’ve learned that when novelty feels like déjà vu, it’s often proof you’re already beyond the canon.
3. “Impossible” Loses Its Grip
When people respond with “that’s impossible,” you feel puzzled. History offers a striking reminder: on October 9, 1903, the New York Times ran an editorial titled “Flying Machines Which Do Not Fly” after Samuel Langley’s failed Aerodrome test, suggesting that a successful flying machine might require “from one million to ten million years” to evolve (New York Times, 1903). Just 69 days later, the Wright brothers achieved the first powered flight (Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum). What experts called impossible was already being built. Immersed in daily innovation, you learn that “impossible” is only an untested assumption.
4. Withdrawal From Habit
You feel an almost instinctive distance from conversations built on “we’ve always done it this way.” What once sounded like tradition now feels like stagnation. Research shows that about 70% of organizational change programs fail due to entrenched mindsets (McKinsey, 2015).
5. Expansion Reflex
You discover that cognitive growth is not a one-time gain but a reflex: once expanded, it demands to be sustained. My Challenge opened the path to freediving, which captivated me not for competition, but for how it revealed hidden layers of body intelligence, and how those layers, once awakened, could fuel imagination itself. I had developed greater neuroplasticity without knowing it. Science confirms this: learning new skills measurably reshapes the brain; even a study on adults learning to juggle showed structural changes in gray matter after only weeks of practice (Draganski et al., 2004).
6. X-Ray Vision for Pseudo-Innovation
You begin to see, almost with X-ray clarity, how much capital flows into pseudo-products and pseudo-innovations: startups optimized not to solve real problems, but simply to raise the next round. Global venture data confirms the imbalance. In 2012, Shikhar Ghosh’s widely cited finding from Harvard Business School was: 75% of venture-backed startups never return cash to investors, with 30–40% failing outright (Fast Company, 2012). More recent data confirms that trend persists: 64% of VC deals from 2009 to 2018 failed to even return the principal (Phoenix Strategy Group, 2024). Despite urgent planetary needs, climate tech attracted only 8–12% of total VC dollars in 2024: far below what would be needed for systemic innovation (PwC, 2024; Ada Lovelace Institute, 2024).
7. Education’s Hidden Flaw
You feel a sharp contrast between how education is done today and how it could be if even a fraction of practices like the 365 Innovation Challenge were applied. A NASA-backed study of 1,600 children found that 98% scored as creative geniuses at age five, but by adulthood, only 2% did (George Land, TEDx 2011). One possible lesson is that formal schooling plays a role in eroding natural creativity; though parenting, societal pressure, and cultural norms may also contribute. Either way, by adulthood most people are trained to consume rather than create.
8. Loss of Nature Connections
You realize how profoundly humanity has lost its bond with the living world — from soil and water to the intelligence woven through them. Dolphins, octopuses, and even pigs are still treated as resources rather than fellow citizens of our shared planet. Dolphins possess advanced social memory and may even use whistle patterns as a kind of language (National Geographic, 2025); octopuses display remarkable cognition: a recent peer-reviewed study found that Octopus vulgaris not only solves complex puzzles, but also shows clear interindividual differences in learning and problem-solving (Biology, 2023); and pigs show self-recognition and emotional complexity, even using mirrors to solve problems (Wired, 2009). This is both an ethical failure and a squandered reservoir of empathy, knowledge, and innovation.
9. Addiction to “What’s Next”
Even after Innovation Concept #365, my brain kept scanning for solutions. The first concept was never final: it always triggered another, and then another. Revisiting a concept often meant finding a sharper version, as if a natural generative AI was running inside me, producing iterations I didn’t even ask for.
10. Hope and Impatience Together
You see infinite possibilities, but also feel restless with how slowly systems move compared to the speed of imagination.
At first glance, nothing seemed to change when I finally reached 365 concepts. The world did not stop, nor did doors immediately open. What did appear, however, were voices questioning the legitimacy of my work. As I announced the book, some who had never followed the journey began to dismiss it — suggesting it was “AI-generated” or borrowed. Yet for over 616 days, I had quietly published my concepts on Instagram, often in the middle of the night or at dawn, documenting the struggle and the discipline of showing up.
I have, in fact, spent years working with AI for innovation: testing approaches, experimenting with applications, mapping both its strengths and its limits. At the beginning of the Challenge, I probably believed more in AI than I do now. Perhaps I needed that belief to be brave enough to stand in one of my Haas classes and promise to create 365 innovation concepts in a year. But as the days turned into months, I discovered that AI did not replace creativity. It often gave me only convenient, obvious combinations, what I sometimes called a “vinaigrette of existing ideas.” Where generative AI truly proved useful was in scale: accelerating discovery, scanning patents and papers in seconds, and enabling a velocity of learning I could never have achieved alone. The demand of the Challenge: to imagine something always one step ahead of what already exists, could not be met by AI alone. That demand came from human imagination, persistence, and the willingness to step into discomfort again and again.
Another practice that sustained me was sports. Endurance had been my teacher long before this challenge: Ironman 70.3 races, marathons, long training hours that pushed me to ask how repetition and effort could shape not only the body, but also the mind. Later, my path took me into freediving, a practice that revealed how movable our frames of self-perception truly are. When you descend into depth on a single breath, the boundaries of what you think is possible dissolve. You surface changed.
This is my deepest hope: that imagination, trained with the same regularity as endurance sports or freediving, can help us surface as different people: the kind of humans the world, in the age of generative AI and planetary crisis, needs most. AI can assist, endurance can sustain, but imagination remains the act that makes us who we are. It is still the one capacity that runs ahead of machines, and perhaps the one that can help us regenerate the planet we call home.
