Big ideas are nothing new in Minnesota. Earl Bakken’s big idea gave us the battery-powered pacemaker. And Betty Crocker—herself a big idea of the General Mills marketing team—had a big idea that gave us shelf-stable cake mix. Truly, without Minnesotans the world wouldn’t have the supercomputer, the pop-up toaster, or Zubaz. And if these 35 ideas, inventions, and innovations are any indication, Minnesota’s not done thinking yet.
NO. 1
Up North is famous for its vast boreal forests. A Grand Rapids scientist is making sure they remain vast as the climate warms.
Most Minnesotans feel a deep calm on their way up north: The air cools and freshens, and foliage perceptively shifts from the hardwoods of the south to the great boreal pine forest of the north. But species like white and black spruce, balsam fir, and quaking aspen are endangered by our warming climate and encroaching pests. The worst-case scenario is that within 100 years the Boundary Waters will be surrounded by prairie or wide-open savanna. Thankfully, scientists at the University of Minnesota, The Nature Conservancy, and the U.S. Forest Service are planning what our future boreal forest will look like. Brian Palik has been stationed at the Grand Rapids Forest Service research lab for the past 26 years.
“The predictions for northern Minnesota are pretty bleak,” he says about the anticipated 10-degree hikes in winter temps if CO2 continues to grow unabated. “So if we want pine forests 100 years from now, we better look at a range of options.”
One of the best options is called “assisted migration,” which Palik and his crew have been working toward by planting trees in their experimental forest to determine which perform better in warmer, drier conditions—trees like ponderosa pine from the west and burr oak from the south.
“We’re trying to demonstrate that people can start planting these species now in these northern pine forests and expect them to do well.”
NO. 2
An Edina guy parlayed the pandemic into a return trip to the White House.
Andy Slavitt wasn’t always a health care crusader. After graduating from UPenn’s Wharton School and receiving his MBA from Harvard, Slavitt was settling into life as an investment banker and McKinsey type before his good friend died of a brain tumor. During the process, Slavitt saw firsthand the sort of collateral damage the American health care system can inflict on a family, as his friend’s widow and children were forced to move in with the Slavitts. He jumped into health care and ended up in Minnesota as a vice president at UnitedHealth’s Optum. And when the Obama administration hired Optum to fix the botched rollout of the Affordable Care Act’s Healthcare.gov, he went with the team to D.C. Before long, he became the acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Slavitt spent most of the Trump administration fighting efforts to repeal the ACA. That is, until the pandemic set him on an entirely new course. Via his biweekly podcast, In the Bubble: From the Frontlines, he became one of the most prolific real-time sources of credible information and interviews about COVID-19. It even led to a book, Preventable: The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response, slated to be published in June. Slavitt’s COVID deep dive also got him back into the White House as a senior advisor on President Biden’s COVID response team.
NO. 3
We repurpose abandoned iron ore mines into aeroponic farms.
Community-supported agriculture (CSA), wherein farms sell their crops directly to individuals and families, is nothing new. Neither are decommissioned mines in northern Minnesota. Marrying the two, however? Now that is a horse of a different color. And yet that’s exactly what Tower-based farm start-up Harvest Nation is readying to do via vertical aeroponic farming in the Soudan Underground Mine. Wait. What? In the where?! Vertical aeroponic farming (a novel method of soil-free farming that constantly mists crops with nutrient-filled water to grow) in the underground physics laboratory of Minnesota’s first iron ore mine. Harvest Nation is the brainchild of Denise Pieratos, Tracey Dagen, Dani Pieratos, and Nikki Love. The women, who are all members of the Bois Forte Band of Chippewa, have long wanted to establish a four-season indoor farm to provide their community nutrient-rich, fresh, and affordable produce, and a random encounter with an official from the Lake Vermilion-Soudan Underground Mine State Park led to the epiphany that the mine’s physics lab room, replete with 40-foot-high ceilings, would be just the place. Now, designs are in place, financing is in progress, and once financing is firmed up, presale produce box subscriptions will be available for around $55 per week. Heirloom, soilless, iron-ore-mine dragon carrots? Don’t mind if we do.
NO. 4
We invented an iron lung… for your head?
Early in COVID, when PPE was at its shortest supply and hospital staff were realizing that N95 masks alone wouldn’t cut it for frontline health care workers, U of M Medical School professors Drs. Kumar Belani and Gwenyth Fischer were inspired by a concept they’d seen in Taiwan and created a rigid cube structure that goes over an infected patient’s head. Their “ventilator box” has ports for workers’ arms to access the patient and HEPA filtration to save negative-pressure rooms for the patients who need them most.
NO. 5
A company from Burnsville created a way for you to make sure Grandma’s taking her meds when you can’t be in the same place as Grandma.
Video messaging apps like FaceTime have become indispensable in maintaining contact with Grandma and Grandpa during the pandemic. But what if you actually have to make sure they’re taking their pills at the right time?
Enter Burnsville start-up Omcare’s new home medicine dispenser. Adapted from CEO and founder Lisa Lavin’s smart treats dispenser for pets, the slick new device takes Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and mellows her out by crossing her with a machine that reminds us of Pixar’s adorable Wall-E.
The dispenser’s interactive cameras allow you to not only watch Gammy take her pills when she’s supposed to take them but also to make sure she actually swallows them down. Now all it needs is a spoonful-of-sugar button.
Read the full list from Mpls. St.Paul Magazine here.