TANDO Institute’s global Fellows bring broad interdisciplinary expertise to bear on complex, unstructured problems. Linking creative management with emerging technologies and new thinking about economic systems, TANDO creates publications, curriculum, and partnerships, and takes practical, measurable and impactful actions for sustainable human, environmental, and technological development. TANDO creates economic opportunity and shared prosperity for communities, governments, and organizations.

TANDO Institute identifies promising technologies and speeds their paths to commercialization/valorization.

• When the tech is still far from market, we convene “Tiger Workshops” of expert and interested parties, to share knowledge and to brainstorm. These workshops have resulted in new venture companies, new academic disciplines or curricula, or books/reports. One that resulted in fast commercialization was the Software Tiger Workshop in the 1990s; one that resulted in new curricula had to do with New Economics.
• When the tech is on the verge of market launch, we build “innovation ecosystems,” bringing together a metro area’s industry, government, and academic sectors, as well as community leaders and constituencies, in order to boost and coordinate the entrepreneurial energy, business expertise, investment capital, and complementary technologies that will make the metro a leader in industrializing the new tech. We launch new facilitating organizations (e.g., the Software Quality Institute; incubators; angel networks). Key successes have included Austin, Texas, and Cincinnati, Ohio.
• We coach locations worldwide on building innovation ecosystems – via visiting delegations, visiting scholars, the World Technopolis Association (2009-18), etc. Importantly, because cities and their immediate environmens are where innovation happens, and because collocation is still important for much ecosystem-related progress, we concentrate on cities.
• We launch innovative applications of newest tech. We developed the Strategic AI-Climate Leadership Certificate, to be launched in 2026 with university partners. Our other partner organizations have created Kokoro, the wisdom AI; and created an AI-based app for helping organizations create actionable strategic plans.

“TANDO tackles the big problems.”

• We have lately focused much attention on climate change, launching the Climate Leadership Certificate (based on a TANDO Institute Fellow’s book The Gaiapolis Strategy) with the aim of creating a global corps of change agents.
• We are engaged with the city of Austin, to create and drive a vision for the city’s next transformation. TANDO handles the social and political side, while our partner organization handles the smart infrastructure side.
• Some of our 90 Fellows are advocating in connection with telecom policies, including spectrum allocation and satellite policy.
• Of course we are also available to for-profit companies and to governments, to facilitate or conduct visioning exercises.

“TANDO’s activities are local, regional, and global.”

• Local. We were just interviewed by an Albuquerque newspaper concerning the potential for updating the hard infrastructure and information infrastructure of an historic neighborhood along Route 66. The challenge: How to do this while maintaining the area’s picturesque, vintage, and historically important appearance and character. We are now seeking funding for this project.
• Regional. By identifying university centers of excellence along the corridor from Waco through Austin, San Antonio, Laredo, and Monterey – and their potential for creating new industries – we created a decades-long ongoing dialog along the (mostly I-35) corridor’s institutions. We’re seeking funding for doing the same along New Mexico’s I-25 corridor, again extending into old Mexico.
• Global. Our climate work is of course global, as are the Gaiapolis and smart city thrusts. In March we co-organized a smart city conference in Taipei, and have offered specialized TANDO sessions at other conferences in Europe and Asia.

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