The Tinker Fund
Superfiduciary R&D
The Tinker Fund is a working title for a prototype concept proposal being developed in collaboration with Tinker|Bristol, a manufacturing incubator and makerspace as a new approach to superfiduciary R&D. The main idea is that
IN DEVELOPMENT
Evergreencore.org is working to bring Sea Potential into Tinker|Bristol as the catalyst for creating an ocean energy center of excellence in research, development, manufacturing and best practices in the Ocean State.
Sea Potential began as a team formed by evergreen.core founder Tim MacDonald in partnership with two engineers from Belfast in Northern Ireland, Paul Brewster and Philip Irwin, to enter Paul and Philip’s design for the DUO wave energy converter into the Wave Energy Prize being conducted by the US Department of Energy.
Tim introduced Sea Potential, and the DUO and the Wave Energy Prize to Tinker|Bristol, a new, non-profit manufacturing incubator and makerspace being organized in the coastal town of Bristol, Rhode Island, and negotiated with Tinker to adopt Sea Potential as its first enterprise-in-residence, for the purpose of rallying local businesses and universities with a long tradition of deep knowledge and practice experience in marine materials, design and manufacturing to the new possibilities of building an ocean energy center of excellence in Bristol, and Rhode Island, generally – known as the Ocean State.
The ambition, in particular, is to prove the unique fitness-for-purpose of advanced composites for us in constructing DUO’s as long-lived, low-maintenance, high-reliability offshore ocean energy conversion systems for generating electricity to power coastal population centers, as well as providing open ocean data sensing stations for oceanographic, communications and coastal security purposes.
The strategy is to coalesce a critical mass of business and university commitment sufficient to attract government and philanthropic funding for ongoing basic and applied research and development of the DUO and other designs and applications, leading ultimately to superfiduciary funding for commercial deployment as a regenerative contribution to the new energy economy.
We hope, through doing this, to establish a pattern that will be followed more broadly of superfiduciary funding for incubator/makerspaces as a form of superfiduciary R&D, a way of looking out into the economy to see where change is creating the need and the opportunity for co-creative, collaborative and evolutionary adaptation to change.