PAST PROJECTS
GROUNDBREAKERS
GroundBreakers is a collaborative open innovation platform emerging from Space for Food for the Yield Lab Institute. GroundBreakers uses ecosystem mapping, non-dilutive and equity funding, programming, and corporate partnerships so innovators in emerging areas like Controlled Environment Ag (vertical farming), alternative proteins, digital transformation of the agrifood system, microbial foods, precision fermentation, regenerative and circular growing systems, and bioeconomies are more likely to succeed. Openly Disruptive conceived GroundBreakers and is launching it for the Institute in 2022.
SPACE FOR FOOD
With Elon, Jeff, Richard, and a thousand other entrepreneurs engaged in the next space race, NASA and others saw that the innovations required to feed humanity’s push into space could pay big dividends for a food-insecure world. Working for the Yield Lab Institute, Space for Food was an effort to understand the ecosystem of deep tech ag and food innovators to learn how the Institute could better serve them.
PET CARE INNOVATION PRIZE & NETWORK
Launched with Active Capital, Cultivation Capital, and Nestle Purina, the Pet Care Innovation Prize and Pet Care Innovation Network are a startup competition and founder network that build relationships and visibility in the $90B pet care market across food/nutrition, IoT, DTC, health, retail tech, services, and more. Openly Disruptive’s Dan Reus played a key role from founding in 2016 through the 2021 cohort.
EMERGING VENTURE LEADERS SUMMIT (EVLS)
Working with Active Capital, the Emerging Venture Leaders Summit (EVLS) was an in person summit bringing early career venture capital professionals together to learn and develop co-investment relationships - and improve deal flow and access to capital in the regional startup ecosystem.
METRONOME
Emerging from a Disruptive Diner session, Metronome was an early effort to build a decentralized and privacy focused data platform to align the interests of patients, providers, payers, and caregivers - reducing risk and improving outcomes while keeping data secure. Far too early for its time, Metronome was paused in 2016. See a little more about Metronome here.
DISRUPTIVE DINER
This event series allowed innovators (researchers, entrepreneurs, early adopters, hackers, investors, and others) to engage in peer learning and find collaboration partners in digital health, gamification, open source models, mixed reality media, decentralization, creator economies, civic hacking, location based tech, bio-foundries, vertical farming, and more.