Periphery Park

What: By harnessing the power of the untapped genius of non-traditional communities, Periphery Park (P2) increases the available brain trust to support innovation locally, national and globally.

How: P2 partners with public, private and academic leaders committed to introduce, implement and scale innovation in non-traditional communities.

Our four-part engagement strategy is:

1) educate NTCs and partners to the opportunities and challenges of developing and leveraging unexpected innovators and their unique perspective on innovation possibilities

2) Engage NTCs in a process of feedback and idea and product development

3) Embed Product placement in NTCs to access unexplored markets and ideas

4) Escalate by scaling engagement, product consumption and ideation through targeted sales and marketing strategy specific to particular NTCs

Our Unexpected Innovators Challenge identifies and spotlights innovators in Non-Traditional Communities (NTCs) by providing a monetary award of up to $10,000. Our goal is to support promising and scalable innovations in the fields of education, technology, food security and healthy communities.

P2 provides the physical, social and intellectual infrastructure to ensure that the innovation coming from and available to NTC grows ten-fold in the next two years.

Who: We are led by Allessandra Bradley-Burns, an innovation strategist with extensive experience in systems and product development in the education, health and social service sectors. P2 advisors include Monica Palacio, Jamil Poonja and Melissa Bradley.

Where: Non Traditional Communities are places where media, technology and broader innovation leaders do not typically look for and expect innovation to occur. They are urban poor, rural, isolated, orthodox and institutionalized populations that lack access to education, experimental science and investment dollars necessary for optimal innovation development.

Why: We transform non-traditional communities from inactive or passive participation in generating innovation into fully engaged communities where indigenous innovation is sparked and shared. We do this through the solicitation of ideas and prototypes as well as the creation of linkages between isolated and disenfranchised communities and mainstream innovation leaders and labs.