Origin Of The SMART Idea

Hello hello!

My name is Chris and I had this idea about closed loops. Many years ago I realized that helping people is one of the most meaningful things a person can do. My friends and I talked often of how solar technology, ecology, hydroponics, undersea exploration, futurism, robotics and more could solve problems for everyday folks. I knew that In isolation most industries and businesses operate as loops with many forms of waste that isn’t the desired output. The inputs are bought with money and the outputs are sold for money so every business in an economy is a loop – with waste.

The question occurred to me: Leaving aside losses from raw entropy – how can we make closed cycle processes in local industry with zero waste? The simple but incomplete answer is that if you weave various loops together in a system and eliminate distribution costs by having it all in one place then all waste becomes useful byproduct in one or more loops of the system. Sharing waste in a controlled fashion eliminates the waste – like composting on a farm or using waste heat from a factory to heat local homes. Designing one business process is tricky enough, building a system of them is even harder. Like most ideas this ran round in my head along with others about all sorts of things I find interesting.

Back to the Future: As a mature student I went back to school and finished my B. Com H plus a few other project centric courses. The experience at the Telfer School of Management was amazing. This was my second try at university and I had just finished a college diploma level program. I was ready for all the incredible knowledge offered to me. My classmates and I started a campus club in 2010 called the Ottawa Sustainable Initiative Group (OSIG) because we believed there were ways to change the world. If you put in the effort, university has incredible things to offer. My love of science dovetailed perfectly with an advanced commerce program. I took the opportunity to investigate what I saw were some of my best ideas and found they had not yet been developed. Some of those you will find on this site and some are coming when we do builds, projects and shows in the near future.

Seeing the System: Then a few years ago I realized that homesteading, tiny houses, certain forms of modern agriculture and meals-ready-to-eat (MRE rations) were all like human space travel. The food is terrible in space so we will work on that… Resources cycle, information flows and when things go wrong in space it is usually because a loop is broken. We don’t know how to build all the loops we need yet, especially on Earth. If we knew all of these things then recycling would be perfect, there would be no pollution and everyone in the world would have an incredible standard of living. I have always loved space science, rocketry and I grew up in the country with plenty of rural skills. So I realized many closed loop systems our civilization needs can be provided by small farms built into our urban and peri-urban areas. Little farms can be a life support system for cities. This is highly integrated biourbanism and the farms use the urban loops around them

Many people have ideas. An idea, even if it works, is a tiny fraction of a working system. So I started learning from all the people around me. There were plenty of brilliant people at the university, usually people who are “book-smart” but in business school you run into many practical people too. I also know plenty of people who are brilliant, just not book-smart. From all of these people I put together the concept for SMART schools. It was hard to explain because there are so many moving parts, so much possibility, at a small school. The campus was a farm, I had figured that out from homesteading, etc. Then I realized it wasn’t too different from a hotel with a restaurant. I have worked in a great hotel all through school and since.

Why is it like a hotel with restaurant? The answer is that our students need a few basic things. If we feed them and help their families, they don’t have to work. Now that they have time to learn we can make that happen because we have staff and the internet. I have seen so many guests study or prepare presentations at the hotel – MDs writing high level exams, professionals, PhDs, NRC scientists, etc. So that works, especially if we give them an even better learning environment with other resources. We would still need staff, but if we structured our program so it is efficient (lean) then it won’t take too much labor. I had run a successful tutoring company for a few years so I knew the approach would work.

Helping Local Students: Our students are young people who could shine but are wasting their potential. The big issue for them is they have no money, so tuition must be zero. Worse than that, it costs money to go to school even when tuition is free so we need to provide supplies and food too. Their families need extra food because these students would otherwise work low earning, unskilled jobs to help the household out. All of this isn’t a problem if we budget carefully. We can make videos, do podcasts and livestream on campus. Media content and our Champion’s Club can earn just enough if we set the campus up for easy filming. Students working on projects will automatically make cool videos, plus they will be self documenting their work. File storage and camera kits are now cheap enough to make this possible. We can do art too, even food is art and we will run a café.

A bistro-café makes sense because we are already cooking for staff, students and family every day. Nora, Richard and I will be eating the same healthy, tasty meal plan as everyone else – it will be good. At that point I was thinking “… this is going to be a great school, if we can do the science”. Some costing showed that some types of affordable research could be done on a small budget if we did science on a small farm – good that our campus is an experimental farm. To fund more diverse lines of research I realized we can offer an international student program. International students pay tuition, come and stay in our rooms get an amazing experience. They can do the science with our local teams for weeks or months and also experience local culture. So this is research tourism and now we are essentially running a hotel with a bistro-café. This is research tourism and now we are essentially running a hotel with a bistro-café.

So that all seemed SMART. Students doing Media, Art and Research projects in Teams. Local students get everything free, international students subsidize the more expensive research projects. We also realized that a very efficient, low cost version of the system could run on a small farm in any tropical or sub-tropical climate… so long as the growing season was year round. This happens to cover an area with more than two billion people who need schools like this. My co-founders know much more about agriculture and bioscience than I do. Nora grew up farming in the Philippines and has a genuine green thumb. Richard is an old friend I met through geeky hobbies like science fiction and also happens to be an expert horticulturalist and scientific polymath. I started with the engineering. All of this took a while for us work out and even longer to explain in a coherent way. For about a year I couldn’t talk about it because I would get lost in the details – but the system is elegant once you realize student projects are each considered separately. It really is a like a small inn on a large market garden.

The Alpha Site: We spent another year designing our prototype campus – basecamp. If you read the development roadmap and check out the resources we’ve posted you will see the various modules. The idea is now a viable design, from property to program. With modest funding we could have this running inside of a year. Depending on how we do this, it will cost less than a single home in most Canadian cities. For less than that… say the price of a low-end luxury car… we could be hosting our first student team on a freshly planted farm campus. I could give you more accurate projections but depending on the pattern of funding, time horizon, inflation and a hundred other things the estimates will vary. A single home and low-end luxury car are pretty good benchmarks though. The best thing is we can build the second campus more efficiently and growing a network of schools makes things easier as we go. This scales up very well.

Now we are reaching out to you. Help us build schools and create opportunity for those who need it.

Sincerely,

Chris J. Kent

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