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Hello science fiction: a fast-track formula for environmental tech

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Heading up the Science Engine of Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition, Rachel Kropa wants to shake up funding norms for innovative ideas.

Imagine growing cotton without a plant or 3D-printing a steak. How about sequencing the genome of an extinct species of ladybug, with hopes of bringing it back from the dead? These pioneering innovations are among the growing number of projects that the Science Engine, a non-profit technology incubator run by Robert Downey Jr.’s Footprint Coalition, aims to propel out of realms of science fiction.

“The current system for science funding is not moving at the pace of an emergency,” says Rachel Kropa, who joined the Hollywood actor to establish the Science Engine in late 2019.

This is particularly true for ingenious ideas that may at first seem risky, but could be revolutionary if given the chance – ideas that Kropa’s team is most interested in developing.

In 2022, the Science Engine funded 40 such projects in seven categories of environmental technology: cellular agriculture, conservation biotech, environmental justice, indigenous futures, metascience, mycological innovations and negative-emissions technologies. When asked which she is most proud of, Kropa laughs, “Oh my gosh, there are so many, that’s like choosing your favourite child!”

Commercializing these early-stage technologies remains a work in progress. It helps, though, that the non-profit Science Engine is “one leg of a three-legged stool” in the Footprint Coalition, Kropa told The Brilliant. The organization also includes an investment division, which houses top-tier funds and investor groups, and a media division called Foot.Notes.

By uniting a network of investors, donors and storytellers in pursuing a common goal, the Footprint Coalition aims to fast-track the process of finding, funding and spreading the word about new technologies that can help to restore the planet.

We’re all working on different problems and coming at it from different angles, but it’s all in the name of environmental technology,” says Kropa, who believes that the more people there are working on climate and biodiversity challenges, the faster solutions can be found. “Investors can fund a whole category, or just one thing, that could change the course of history.”

Star quality, skilling-up and storytelling   

It was in mid-2019, less than a year before COVID-19 spread worldwide, that Robert Downey Jr. launched his Footprint Coalition. Using the platform of re:MARS, Amazon’s annual global artificial intelligence (AI) event, his keynote address was nothing if not dramatic. Through fields such as nanotechnology and robotics, “we could probably clean up the planet significantly, if not entirely, within a decade”, he told the crowd.

Over the next 11 months, Downey Jr. also promised to get “some actual smart people around him”, to realise his vision for the Footprint Coalition. Kropa was one of the first.

The pair first met through the Creative Artists Agency (CCA), a Los Angeles-based talent and sports agency, where Downey Jr. was a client. Kropa had spent 16 years running CCA’s environmental and social impact projects. In 2019, she had recently become a mum, and was thinking more about how she could make an impact on global sustainability. When she saw what Downey Jr. was proposing, she knew she had the skills and resources to help. “We met up to discuss the possibilities,” says Kropa, and by October that year, she’d joined the Footprint Coalition.

From there, the team grew quickly, with storytelling at the centre. Jonathan Shieber, a former a senior editor at US technology publisher TechCrunch, was hired to run the media strategy. “This gave us the ability to work from the journalistic end of the spectrum, all the way up to premium content,” says Kropa.

Team Downey, the film production company of Downey Jr. and his wife Susan, delivers the ‘premium’ content, much of which can be described as ‘edutainment’.

Kropa, who co-hosts Downey Jr.’s Downstream Channel, says he has a knack for making complex topics accessible to a wide audience. “Robert can make fantastic content out of virtually anything,” she says.

The channel is shared across a number of social media platforms, and has 140,000 YouTube subscribers. It harnesses a raft of storytelling techniques, from animation to expert interviews, film archive and documentary footage. Longer videos exploring themes such as waste, meatless products and geo-design are one approach. Meanwhile, shorter clips on the technologies and companies the Footprint Coalition is investing in are brought to life by an animated Robert Downey Jr broadcasting from his ‘edumacation station’. In less than a minute or two, for example, he explains what biovanescent PHA means for plastic waste, and how methane emissions can power energy-guzzling data centres.

Both the investment and non-profit legs of Footprint Coalition benefit from its media strategy, but there are other synergies, too, says Kropa.

“When there are emerging trends in the world of venture capital, this might help to inform me of where there’s a need for early career research in environmental tech,” she says. Kropa hopes that the coalition’s venture-capital brains will help to propel the most promising environmental innovations that emerge from the Science Engine to commercial viability. 

Her work is already turning heads. In November 2022, the Science Engine was named Breakthrough of the Year in Science and Innovation Management at Falling Walls, Berlin, an international conference for leaders in science, business, politics and the arts.

Reckoning with risk

In the early stages of breakthrough research, scientists are often hampered by bureaucracy and an arduous funding process, particularly if their work is perceived to be risky, or ‘out of the box’. Kropa sees a need for speed. “We aim to vet and approve the applications of individual environmental researchers who are working in new fields without access to traditional sources of funding – in as little as two weeks,” she says.

The Science Engine was inspired by Fast Grants, an American charity launched in April 2020 with an aim to accelerate the approval of vaccination technology during the pandemic. But the model goes a step further by adding the feature of public crowdfunding.

The first step is for scientists to submit a short application for seed grants of between US$5,000 and $10,000. Applications can be filed from anywhere in the world. The application is made public on experiment.com, a platform for funding scientific research, and is verified by a dedicated science lead. These experts are selected by the Science Engine team for their strong academic credentials and networks within their field.

Once approved, half of the funds are granted from the coalition’s network of donors, which includes Downey Jr. and Kropa herself, and the other half comes from crowdfunding.

The crowdfunding feature accelerates “high-risk, high-reward research”, says Kropa, and brings a much wider “community of support into the scientific process”. The public nature of the process also ensures greater transparency, she adds.

Looking to the future, Kropa’s aim is to find more ways to link scientists with mentor networks. “We’re also starting to plan for a potential institute that can [help] people convene, collaborate and work inter-disciplinarily,” she says.

She’s also committed to getting the message out about the need to invest in innovative ideas, no matter how ‘out there’ they might seem at first. “We need to keep iterating and developing efficiencies and asking important questions, but also creating the detail and colour that delivers the message to a broad audience,” she says.

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Story by Pamela Whitby

Image credit: Falling Walls

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