By Ryan Murphy
The Virginian-Pilot
Jun 20, 2018
Rising sea levels are a massive threat to Hampton Roads and its economy. How can local governments tackle such a huge problem?
By betting on the little guys.
That’s the logic behind the nonprofit RISE, which will fund small businesses that are working on solutions to flooding and other problems caused by climate change and sinking land.
RISE is looking to deal with the problems of a rising tide while turning the potential economic ruin into a growth industry.
The group just received $10 million in state and federal funding to spend over the next five years. It’s put out the call for its first $1.2 million challenge: If you’ve got an idea, come fight for a slice. (You’ve got until September to apply.)
Dozens of entrepreneurs who think they’ve got a million-dollar idea showed up to a recent workshop at the Slover Library to hone their pitches, which range from a $50 sensor to detect when a road is flooded, to community laboratories.
If RISE thinks any of those projects have potential and – this is key – have a legitimate business plan to back them up, they may be in line for some seed money.
Down the road, the businesses could net potentially lucrative contracts with governments in Hampton Roads.
RISE’s ultimate hope: that the businesses take their concepts worldwide and Hampton Roads becomes a hub for the business of resiliency.
But first, it has to start with an idea.
On the sixth floor of the Slover Library one Thursday in May, the pitches ranged from why-didn’t-I-think-of-that concepts to head-scratchers.
A Navy lieutenant talked through the logistics of turning old cruise ships into floating apartment blocks. One woman described her idea for environmental labs open for public use in poor neighborhoods.
One man pitched “Waze for waterways,” an application where users would populate a map with boating hazards, environmental issues and wildlife on and around the area’s rivers and coasts.
Professors from Old Dominion University, researchers from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science and representatives from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were on hand to help a room full of hopeful entrepreneurs hone their resilience ideas and hash out their business plans.
“There were some pretty cool ideas, and a few need work,” said Paul Robinson, a former aerospace engineer and business owner who now serves as RISE’s executive director.
Some ideas were little more than a twinkle in their creator’s eye, while others were further along.
A pair of engineers showed off a prototype for a dirt-cheap sensor to detect street flooding. Comparable sensors can cost thousands of dollars – these could do a lot of the same work at a fraction of the cost. Scattering them around the city could help build a real-time model of flooding and gather data for predictive analysis.
That got the attention of Norfolk’s emergency manager, Jim Redick.
The city has to rely on tidal data to try to predict flooding, which neglects precipitation, making accurate predictions difficult.
“The predictive analysis would be huge for us,” Redick said. “Do people need to move their car?”
Redick says he’d use a sensor network like that in a heartbeat.
Then, Redick’s imagination kicked into high gear. Rather than just an alert, the sensor network could automatically trigger folding signs or barriers to prevent motorists from entering flooded streets.
“The sexy thing to me is that arm that goes down.”
RISE doesn’t aim to fight back against sea level rise directly, but rather to give small businesses the tools to tackle the problem.
“We don’t make up the topics,” Robinson said. “Cities approach us (and say) ‘Find an innovative solution to my problem.’ ”
Katerina Oskarsson, the other half of RISE’s two-person staff, said it can be tough for small companies to sell products aimed at large problems.
They’re often too expensive for private customers. Governments might have the money, but their procurement processes can be hard for small firms to navigate.
“Cities are very risk averse,” Oskarsson said. “They don’t tend to buy products from startups. They don’t want them to go out of business.”
That’s where RISE comes in.
By working with small companies from the ground up, it can help them tailor their pitches and ultimately navigate the byzantine rules for doing business with local governments.
RISE – the “coastal resilience accelerator” that was called for as part of a $120 million grant Virginia won from the federal government in 2016 – says it can also help shorten the lag time between a company’s idea and a go-ahead from the city.
In some localities, an entrepreneur looking to run a pilot program can spend 18 months seeking a permit, only to be told no. Robinson said RISE can help get an answer from the city within a day.
The group is also developing a citywide wireless internet network that would be able to connect, for instance, a fleet of sensors. RISE secured the OK to mount Wi-Fi transmitters on city buildings.
Bigger cities like Boston have their own innovation departments, but RISE sees itself filling that role for Hampton Roads cities. It hopes to cultivate an entrepreneur economy and increase the number of high-tech jobs in the region.
One business that wants to be part of that future is Ario, a five-person startup working on a sort of universal augmented-reality system.
Ario’s app uses your phone’s camera to display the world around you, overlaid with information on things that have been tagged. Point the camera at a drill press in a machine shop, and the app could bring up operating instructions or maintenance history.
The company has won several recent honors, including one from NATO recognizing the app’s potential in a disaster zone. Imagine, amid the chaos of a recovery operation, being able to hold your phone up to a truckload full of medicine or food and immediately see where it’s supposed to be headed.
Ario’s ability to tag objects and locations could help local governments deal with recurrent flooding.
A city employee who drives by a flooded drain or downed power line could drop a virtual pin with details. That information could be seen by a dispatcher at headquarters and the work crew that arrives on scene.
This kind of project is everything Robinson said RISE is looking for: a local company with a solution that could be used here to tackle flooding – but also has potential far beyond Norfolk.
“The entire world is looking at Hampton Roads’ problem,” Oskarsson said.
Ryan Murphy, 757-446-2299, ryan.murphy@pilotonline.com
