Introduction

Welcome to Innovation Waypoints.

Welcome to what we hope will be a series of posts and material written by former career staff from federal agencies, at this point primarily from the U.S. Department of Energy, and led by former career staff who want to put out good ideas on program design and what we need to do better out into the universe.

Innovation Waypoints has two objectives: (1) provide honest, in-depth discussion of what we need to do and what we have done - right and wrong - to structure how we fund energy innovation and deployment; and (2) highlight the implementation methods and the programs that have broken the mold and have had incredible results despite bureaucratic challenges.

Our traditional model of thinking about our systems of supporting innovation through deployment in energy to create better pathways needs to be challenged, and we need to uplift great ideas to change the way we fund ideas and programs in the energy and climate ecosystem. The intent behind this Substack will be to evaluate what works, doesn’t work, and demystify funding processes in the federal government. While we are energy-centric authors to start, we believe that our lessons and insights are applicable to people working in governments (at the national or subnational level), philanthropy, and more.

In general, there is not enough discussion about how funding is structured - particularly in federal realms - or enough introspection on what is working and what isn’t, particularly in the energy ecosystem. Conversations tend to be about technology areas, policy reforms, tax credits, how much funding is deployed, but rarely about how solicitations or funding programs are built and how we implement funding and programs to maximize impact. It’s wonky, but true.

But the lack of discussion leads to three issues: (1) failure to learn from good program design; (2) perpetuation of risk averse practices and over management of bureaucratic processes that strangle innovation on HOW we fund innovation and deployment; and (3) a lack of discussion about what IS working and lifting up the voices of the people who have designed and implemented impactful programs.

There are a number of podcasts, substacks, books, etc that feature companies, policymakers, and venture investors that feature great ideas in energy innovation and deployment. But there is a gap to feature the implementers of federal funding in particular, and a lack of technical discussion on how we have funded work to date. This includes discussing what is going well and what has gone wrong. There is even just a lack of bare minimum, clear explanations of what happens inside the federal government to prompt funding.

And we need to have open conversations breaking past the traditional tropes of discussing innovation - focusing on DARPA, or individual programs - and having a more robust discussion on what is and isn’t working within federal and philanthropic funding.

Over the last few months, there have been more conversations about how broken our funding systems are to support clean energy and climate. Whether that’s vulnerabilities in current approaches, or how hard it is to access and navigate funding. This has generally provided a spotlight on how little we in the broader society understand our funding mechanisms and the staff behind them.

But there is little introspection about approaches to public funding and little discussion with the people with deep understanding of the processes within our public sectors that serve as the infrastructure to build and manage programs. That we need a way to both catalogue how - from the perspective of deeply experienced implementers - our innovation management and deployment funding processes are working and not working, and also highlight groundbreaking strategies to foster innovation and technology deployment.

This will be a venue for discussion on the details on how funding gets planned, distributed, assessed, and the considerations in mind.

Our Starting Themes

To start this series out we will have three main themes to kick us off:

• Funding Mechanisms: What are the primary mechanisms that are used, and how do they translate to private funding for research through deployment. We will explore different mechanisms and what has happened to transform different mechanisms over the last few years.

• Risk and Trust: Risk in funding programs and mission-aligned investing is a multi-faceted thing, and includes not only risks around responsible project completion, but also risks to project and program impact from the processes followed to scope and build the portfolio. There are opportunities to make our discussion and characterization of risk more transparent and complete, and thereby give us a better chance to manage and balance all risks and achieve a successful outcome. Risk tolerance is also directly related to trust - and trust in government institutions and intentions has been damaged. Risk is unavoidable when trying to accomplish big things, and trust is critical to take those risks.

• Commercialization and Ecosystems: Commercialization is not a linear process. Funding often follows a trajectory that with enough capital, technology transfer or maturation will happen. But our decades of experience have show, this just simply isn’t true. Advancing technologies requires a deep understanding and evaluation of commercialization. And innovation ecosystems are critical to shepherding good ideas at the local, regional, and national level.

These are the first main themes, but we will broaden and deepen our insights.

The Importance of Public Conversations Now

Funding for energy innovation and deployment has been thrown into upheaval; there is a need to provide introspective commentary on what is breaking our ability to fund research through deployment and retrospective commentary to ensure lessons learned over the last decades are not lost or repeated. There is also a need to highlight some of the ideas on new pathways to support energy and climate investments, and to highlight the doers and implementers of funding programs.

With staff departing the federal government and a number of principles we held in the innovation management and development space under threat, we wanted to start to take the opportunity to highlight what could be improved, what is going well and how processes work in the federal government, and help demystify federal funding writ large. We also wanted to offer a space for other program designers and implementers, from the federal government and beyond, to share ideas.

The State of Understanding

There is a lack of understanding about federal programs and tools, including how they function. Even some of the dialogues are led by those without on the ground experience. A lot of the communication efforts we see highlight the work of the companies that receive and perform under awards. And they’re great, it’s why public servants and philanthropic capital back them! But we don’t actually look at how the capital was distributed by the public sector, and the people behind these structures, or even the original theses that led to the formation of those programs.

Likewise, we are so reluctant - particularly in the climate and energy space - to admit when we got it wrong, or that our over engineered processes haven’t worked. We layer in bureaucracy and risk intolerance and end out strangling or overlooking good ideas to catalyze innovation. We don’t talk about some of the very inherently broken ways we fund and manage innovation.

Fundamental Truths of a Broken System with Promise

So it seems there are three truths right now in the energy/climate innovation funding ecosystem (and quite frankly beyond energy/climate, but we are more equipped to talk about this space):

1. We Have Created Inefficient and Sometimes Broken Processes - We have often made things too difficult and unimplementable to move at the scale and speed we need to, from research through deployment, but…

2. There Are Great Innovators in Implementation - There are some great implementers, program designers, and managers who have made transformational changes in the public sectors, and we should uplift and highlight their strategies and programs. That includes those that left the government; we still should want to capture their lessons learned and their stories, and….

3. The Rate of Change is Disruptive - The world is now moving faster than our bureaucratic systems were ever designed to handle. This acceleration is happening on two fronts: externally, the policy and market environment is incredibly volatile, with massive shifts in funding and priorities. Internally, technological breakthroughs like AI and machine learning are emerging at an exponential rate. These new tools are changing how we model, build, and deploy everything. This creates a fundamental mismatch, where our slow, risk-averse processes are incapable of keeping pace with either the new challenges or the new solutions, strangling the very innovators who are trying to use them.

There needs to be more writing on all concepts - how processes we have built are breaking our ability to foster innovation and deploy technologies, how there are some great ideas being implemented to support innovation through new strategies and technologies, and how we prepare for the future.

This will be a space dedicated to two primary missions: (1) demystifying how funding mechanisms have evolved inside the federal government for program developers and groups trying to access funding, along with the broken elements of supporting innovation and new breaking concepts to foster innovation; and (2) feature work and people behind the amazing energy and climate program design and implementation that serves as the engine behind the research, development, demonstration, and deployment programs in the public sector.

Who Are We

So why us? Why now? The primary authors behind this substack are seasoned veterans who collectively have almost a century’s worth of experience in energy. We’ve collectively built billions of dollars in programs, formed new initiatives and programs that have endured administrations, and have been in career seats where we’ve designed, built, and implemented programs giving us a front row seat to what is working and isn’t.

But we’ve also dealt with frustrations with the processes that impede innovation and deployment. And we’ve seen how there can be better outcomes when we take risks to support innovation and energy deployment. And we want our lessons out in the public domain. Because fundamentally, we’re civil servants at heart. And we want to see better designed programs to incentivize energy innovation and deployment.

And we’ve drawn inspiration - both in the name and purpose of this series - from our colleagues, past and present, and from people who have affected us personally and professionally.

The primary authors of this series will be:

Jennifer Garson: Jenn spent 15 years at the US Department of Energy in various executive roles. As Director of the Water Power Technologies Office, she directed the $200 million Water Power Technologies Office and launched programs that now anchor the blue-economy innovation landscape. She created the Powering the Blue Economy initiative which focused on power applications spanning ocean markets like aquaculture and microgrid power, and supported the design of an $800 million incentive program to modernize the hydropower industry. She helped shape the creation of OCED and managed the launch of the $1 billion Energy Improvements in Rural and Remote Areas provision to address energy security and affordability in communities with less than 10,000 people. She led on the design of new funding mechanisms, created a new DOE-affiliated Foundation for Energy Security & Innovation (FESI), launched more than a dozen rapid prizes, supported new voucher programs for startups, and created new cooperative-agreement pathways that steered public and private dollars to hundreds of start-ups. Her hallmark is translating policy authority into user-friendly programs that grow durable innovation networks.

Andrew Dawson: As Strategy Director at DOE’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations (OCED), Andrew shaped a $25 billion portfolio that moves first-of-a-kind projects from concept to bankability. He led program design for Industrial Demonstrations, Long-Duration Energy Storage, Distributed Energy Systems, Point Source Carbon Capture, Direct Air Capture, Clean Energy on Mine Lands, Energy Improvements for Rural and Remote Communities, and Small Modular Reactors. Andrew also co-authored the Pathways to Commercial Liftoff reports and OCED 2030, aligning technical, policy, and finance milestones across agencies and investors. Over 9 years at DOE, he has established a proven track record in building large, integrated demonstrations that de-risk technology, address commercialization barriers, and crowd-in private capital. Andrew previously led an engineering team at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and worked for GE Energy on solar, wind, and gas turbines.

Garrett Nilsen: As Deputy (and Acting) Director of DOE’s Solar Energy Technologies Office (SETO), Garrett managed a $300+ million-per-year portfolio spanning photovoltaics, solar-thermal, grid integration, supply-chain resilience, and non-hardware solar costs (e.g. workforce development, siting, community acceptance, equitable access to solar). Under his leadership the office launched first of their kind programs to address technology commercialization, solar energy and load forecasting (solar and net load forecasting prizes), renewable energy siting (Renewable Energy Siting through Technical Engagement and Planning, Large Animal Solar System and Operations Prize), renewable energy grid interconnection (Interconnection Innovation Exchange), new uses of solar (Solar Desalination Prize) and more. Garrett spent over 13 years working in SETO aiding the industry’s rise from a minor contributor to the US electricity sector to the nation’s fastest growing energy source. His expertise lies in designing pipelines that swiftly translate research into commercially bankable solutions across energy technologies.

Victor Kane: Victor engineered DOE’s most prolific commercialization program engines, channeling >$1 billion annually into the clean-energy ecosystem. He scaled DOE’s American-Made Challenge prize programs from one solar pilot to 100+ department-wide competitions backed by a 500-member national network; introduced Partnership Intermediary Agreements, now 60+ active funding programs delivering multimillion-dollar projects at startup speed; and created the Energy Program for Innovation Clusters (EPIC) prize-to-grant model anchoring regional incubators. Victor reinvigorated Energy I-Corps, expanded the Technology Commercialization Fund, and launched the MAKE IT (Manufacture of Advanced Key Energy Infrastructure Technologies) Prize to on-shore critical-component production. His team was also instrumental in launching FESI, DOE’s new public-private foundation that channels philanthropic and private capital into commercialization and workforce programs.

Looking Forward

We know this is a general post, with more on what it will focus on rather than the topics. But we wanted to set the stage for what’s to come on this page. There is so much to discuss on program design, what is happening in federal funding, our risk aversion in program design and implementation, highlighting the good work of great program designers and funders, and the opportunities for more innovation in award administration.

We are excited to share our ideas and the ideas of others. And to do it with both a written medium, and connected with artistic expression, we will intersperse posts with Jenn’s own and others’ art as well.

But we need good mediums to discuss how to improve our funding ecosystem, appreciate great implementers, recognize we need new models, and start to provide support for the doers, the people who have run and want to run more programs effectively.

Hope you’ll subscribe and follow along and join us in a conversation about how to move forward and build on our lessons learned.

Innovation Waypoints is brought to you by Waypoint Strategy Group.