Why This Moment Demands a New Platform for Sustainable Growth in the Southeast
Jon is Co-founder of BrandCulture and a pioneer in wedding the disciplines of strategic branding, culture development and interdisciplinary design united in Shared Purpose. Jon is also Co-founder of Synthetic Acumen and ResearchGOAT, a Gen-AI platform that automates the process of qualitative research. And most recently, Jon is Co-founder of Super South | Summit for Sustainable Innovation and Impact.
The political headwinds of our current moment make talking about progress feel a little, well, Panglossian. Pollyannaish, you might even say. A new year brings a sense of urgency, pressure and rapid change as the project of American progress faces a reckoning. It’s against this backdrop that we find ourselves planning the second installment of Super South, our sustainability and innovation conference.
As rivals like China focus on renewables and building a new dominance in the electric tech stack, our country seems to be doubling down on cementing our status as the world’s leading producer and consumer of fossil fuels. We’re looking backward, rather than forward. And it’s going to take a concerted effort on behalf of our nation’s visionaries, dreamers and changemakers to turn the ship around.
But just because it’s challenging doesn’t mean it won’t be done. It’s not a question of if, but of how and when. This uphill battle is exactly why convening matters more than ever, and why this year’s edition of Super South feels especially urgent to us all. We’re focusing on new ideas about a more sustainable, resilient future, thinking bigger, dreaming bolder and building more bridges than ever before.
Imagine Better
When we created Super South, we envisioned a space for clarity, optimism and momentum. Progress has always been the conference’s unifying through-line. We’re future-focused, not ideological, choosing ambition, invention and future-building every time, no matter what side of the political spectrum that leads us toward.
Our colleague and collaborator Christian Rishel, Founder and Principal of Circudyne, said it best when he shared the thought that imagination and progress are complementary. Each requires and inspires the other. “Imagine a better…” are words that naturally go together. We don’t dream of a smaller, more diminished future. We dream of change and opportunity, not for the few, but for all.
The focus here is on progress, not progressivism. We need to move beyond sustaining legacy industries and shift our focus onto growing new drivers of economic change. That means building connections between the people with big ideas, and those with the resources to turn those ideas into reality.
What we’ve found over and over again is that we dream better together. With this installment of Super South, we’ll be gathering together people who are capable of moving the needle on sustainable innovation, focusing on the ways that growing these connections help build a more vibrant, thriving Southern sphere of influence.
Time for The South to Step Up
The truth is, the South hasn’t commanded its space on the global stage to the extent that we believe possible. We need to make a philosophical shift when it comes to sharing the region’s strengths, and maximizing its position.
The South has strong supply chains, with a robust transportation infrastructure, and cities across the region serving as diverse economic hubs. But what’s often overlooked is the strength of our capability chains. It’s time to draw lessons from the successes of electric tech, advanced manufacturing and integrated ecosystems, and move towards a new reality: the South as a true center for American innovation and progress.
The current focus on the South’s strength as a center for business mostly emphasizes the lower cost of doing business in the region. It’s true that factors like lower energy costs, more business friendly tax structures and a generally more affordable cost of living make our region an overlooked but obvious place for startups and innovators, who are able to keep costs low and profits high as they seek new sources of growth.
But affordability isn’t the only thing the South has to offer. The South has led the nation in population growth for decades, with a growing labor market and communities that invest heavily in training and upskilling a skilled workforce for areas like aerospace, logistics and EV manufacturing. With a large consumer base, the region leads the nation in job growth, attracting tech focused companies like Cisco, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce, as well as manufacturing stalwarts like Lockheed Martin and Novelis.
The assets are real, but the story is still waiting to be told. For the South to truly step into the limelight as a center for progress, we need to solve the perception gap.
Convening and Collaboration
The Super South Summit is our way of creating a space for this story to change. It’s a place where we create a platform for interdisciplinary collaboration and shared vision, shaping the region’s economic and logistical strong points into a narrative platform that truly connects to changemakers from throughout the South and far beyond.
We’re in a moment when imagination is more critical than ever before. If we’re going to make change, we need to dream it, and that means drawing on inspiration from one another, committing to the values of growth to align ambitions across disciplines.
The Summit is a place where interdisciplinary vision and shared collaboration come together to build a shared vision of the future to create a space where sustainable innovation meets the real world, and shapes it.
As the past few years have taught us, optimism is important, but it isn’t the whole picture. Progress isn’t inevitable—it’s a choice. Like Alan Kay said, the best way to predict the future is to invent it. Let’s invent it together at Super South.
Super South | March 30, 31 and April, 1 | Georgia Aquarium | Atlanta, GA
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