Welcome to the first-ever Long Island Multimedia Crossover Virtual Extravaganza, a groundbreaking collaboration between Drake Media Studios, Brandtelling and Innovate Long Island. This episode of Spark: The Innovate Long Island Podcast, featuring multimedia producer and talk show host Donna Drake, is also being recorded as a video segment for “The Donna Drake Show,” which is based on Long Island and syndicated across the United States and in 25 countries. In this tech-savvy episode, Donna joins ...
Mar 07, 2022•33 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Paul Schwartz is an entrepreneur, a networker, a VC magnet and the co-founder of a company promising to revolutionize the heating and cooling industries: Stony Brook-based ThermoLift, home of the Hofbauer Thermal Compression Climate Control device. The “TC3,” for short, eliminates toxic refrigerants and replaces older heating, cooling and hot-water systems with one energy-efficient machine that does it all – and does it with low (or zero) carbon emissions, powered by clean biofuels or hydrogen. ...
Feb 22, 2022•30 min•Season 1Ep. 22
The Long Island innovation economy has many leaders, but few as driven or accomplished as Kevin Law. Known best as the longtime president and CEO of the Long Island Association, Kevin has amassed an amazing economic-development record across Long Island’s public and private sectors, helping to generate $5 billion in government and private infrastructure investments – a lawyer, planner, conservationist, business networker, affordable-housing spearhead and relentless soldier for Long Island’s myri...
Feb 15, 2022•34 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Innovate Long Island readers already know David Chauvin, executive vice president of ZE Creative Communications in Great Neck and a cornerstone of Innovate LI’s fantastic Voices column. As our government and media expert, David has explored a wide breadth of accessible and important topics, ranging from social responsibility to the Millennial mindset to the importance of science over sensationalism, with a healthy exploration of social media’s risks and rewards. These topics, of course, cross hi...
Jan 31, 2022•35 min•Season 1Ep. 20
This month marks one full year since Dr. Timothy Sams assumed the presidency of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury. And what a year it’s been. Succeeding longtime president Dr. Calvin Butts III, Tim took over smack dab in the middle of the ever-changing COVID pandemic – a unique challenge for any new administrator, though it turns out his particular set of experiences with inclusive innovation and strategic change, and his decades of professional success at well-regarded un...
Jan 10, 2022•38 min•Season 1Ep. 19
Mitch Maiman truly needs no introduction to the Innovate Long Island audience. A fixture of Long Island innovation, he’s the president and cofounder of Intelligent Product Solutions, a Hauppauge-based product-development consultancy that’s carved a mighty niche as one of the region’s premier creator/enhancers. Mitch has led the company since its 2007 launch and straight through its 2018 acquisition by Forward Industries, which actually relocated itself from Florida to Long Island to allow IPS to...
Dec 23, 2021•37 min•Season 1Ep. 18
Renee Flagler is knee-deep in partnerships and outreach efforts designed to help future socioeconomic innovators positively influence the world they inherit – specifically, the next generation of young professional women. The teacher, award-winning writer and passionate public speaker is entering her fifth year as executive director of Girls Inc. of Long Island, the regional chapter of the national organization devoted to empowering girls to be strong, bold and self-confident in work and all fac...
Dec 20, 2021•29 min
Brian Fried is an inventor in the truest sense – a home-based tinkerer with a garage full of exciting contraptions, a real dedication to creating a better world and a fully realized sense of human nature. Since he made his first commercial mark in 2007 with Pull Ties Fasteners – think “Twisty Ties: The Next Generation” – Brian has created podcasts, written books, launched professional consultancies and formed inventor clubs, all designed to help other makers commercialize their designs. What sta...
Dec 06, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 16
Change is in the air at Hofstra University, where freshly minted President Dr. Susan Poser – the first woman to fill the post – has completed her first 100 days in office and is steaming toward a bold new future for Long Island’s largest private university. A lawyer and long-experienced academician, Dr. Poser now runs what is, essentially, a small city: Hofstra boasts nearly 120 buildings across a sprawling 244-acre campus, with a student body of 10,000-plus and more than 2,500 staff and faculty...
Nov 08, 2021•30 min•Season 1Ep. 15
Stony Brook University cornerstone David Hamilton is one of the hardest workers in all of Long Island innovation. As executive director of Stony Brook’s Clean Energy Business Incubator Program (the “incubator without walls”) and chief operating officer for the university’s Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center (a New York State-funded Center of Excellence), he’s a teacher, a mentor, a master networker, a logistics expert and a team leader for dozens of early-stage energy and sustainabil...
Oct 29, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 14
Armed with gallons of courage and the latest ghost-busting technology science can offer (forget the proton packs, this is serious stuff), the 17 volunteer members of the Long Island Paranormal Investigators team are knee-deep in the other side – facing fearsome phantoms and probing petrifying poltergeists in Long Island’s cemeteries, haunted houses and spooky woods. Fiction, you say? Maybe. But co-founder Michael Cardinuto, a lead director at Westbury-based special-needs social-services agency T...
Oct 20, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 12
With its trendsetting tradeshows, forward-looking committees, 1,300-plus member companies and 11-square-mile industrial park – packed daily with more than 55,000 employees – the HIA-LI (formerly the Hauppauge Industrial Association of Long Island) ranks among Long Island’s most powerful economic engines. As its face, voice and guiding hand, President and CEO Terri Alessi-Micelli occupies a prominent spot in the Long Island zeitgeist and plays a critical role in the Island’s ever-evolving quest f...
Oct 12, 2021•31 min•Season 1Ep. 12
Deep in the Galactically Underrated File sits Adelphi University, a 125-year-old private institution that is routinely overlooked on an Island heavy with world-class universities and laboratories – though not by U.S. News & World Report, which ranks Adelphi a top college for veterans, nursing students, career guidance, social mobility and other key categories that define the nation’s best schools. Keeping Adelphi, it’s roughly 8,000 students and its impressive academic staff ticking is Dr. C...
Jun 21, 2021•30 min•Season 1Ep. 11
The Long Island Association has a new leader – but the LIA is hardly new to Matthew Cohen, the freshly minted president and CEO who’s already logged a decade with Long Island’s largest business and networking organization, primarily as its government relations director. Matt takes over at a touch-and-go time for the 95-year-old association, with the nation emerging from the COVID pandemic and socioeconomic stakeholders jockeying for position in the so-called “new normal.” He’s uniquely suited to...
Jun 21, 2021•19 min•Season 1Ep. 10
Exciting socioeconomic winds are blowing across the nation, and nowhere do those forward-looking gales blow harder than Long Island, where offshore wind-generated electricity is foremost on the minds of private corporations, local governments, top universities and national laboratories, all jockeying for position in the clean-gen power play of the next century. Among those surfing the winds: Eversource Energy, a New England-based utility (and Fortune 500 company) with about 4 million retail elec...
Jun 08, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 10
The Angels had Charlie, that time-traveling dude in Quantum Leap had a Dean Stockwell hologram, Spider-Man has his best buddy Ned and here on Spark: The Innovate Long Island Podcast, we are absurdly lucky to have Arthur Germain as our “man in the chair.” An innovator, entrepreneur and a bona fide genius, Arthur is cut from the classic ink-stained writer/editor mold, with a modern-day finish. He launched Communication Strategy Group in 2005 as an experiment combining boutique-firm intimacy with f...
Jun 01, 2021•37 min•Season 1Ep. 9
constant voice for economic and environmental balance. Mitchell Pally has been the cornerstone institute’s chief executive since 2010, adding another important and influential role to a curriculum vitae that’s absolutely packed with them. A former New York State senator, Mitch held numerous positions in the State Legislature throughout the latter 20th century, helping to draft a first-in-the-nation seatbelt law, among other progressive legislation. For 14 years, he masterminded governmental affa...
May 24, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 8
Ann-Marie Scheidt is a one-woman economic engine, one of the most vital cogs in Long Island’s entire socioeconomic apparatus. A relentless innovator and supporter of innovators, she is personally responsible for more than $25 million in federal and state funds flowing into regional economic-development proposals she herself authored or co-authored. And that barely scratches the surface for this Yale University graduate and Stony Brook University PhD, now the director of economic development at t...
May 18, 2021•33 min•Season 1Ep. 1
Debra Markowitz is a study in innovation – personally, technologically, even economically, as in, the Nassau County economy, which now benefits from $169 million in annual economic activity from local film and TV production, a number that grew steadily (and dramatically, wink) during Debra’s 33 years as Nassau County Film Commissioner. Now home to multiple Hollywood-grade production studios, Nassau boasts more production days than any other New York county except Manhattan, with regional support...
Apr 28, 2021•28 min
Regular Innovate Long Island readers know this name – Rosalie Drago has long energized regional workforce and socioeconomic initiatives, previously as Long Island director of the nonprofit Workforce Development Institute and now as the Suffolk County commissioner of labor, licensing and consumer affairs. As the head of a busy and influential 160-person Labor Department in the nation’s 26th most-populated county, the rookie officeholder has faced many unique challenges – pandemic-related and othe...
Mar 29, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 5
As COVID-19 circumnavigated the globe, scientists representing many disciplines rose to meet it. Among them: James Hayward and the incredible minds at Stony Brook-based Applied DNA Sciences, where long experience and a unique technology set the pace. A molecular biologist by trade, Hayward brings decades of biotech and consumer-product experience to his roles as chairman, president and CEO. Applied DNA cut its teeth as a DNA-based supply chain authenticator – creating forgery-proof DNA markers a...
Mar 29, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 4
If you’ve ever seen a protest or press conference advocating for Long Island environmental justice, you’ve seen Adrienne Esposito, at the microphone, way out in front of the politicians and philanthropists, dispensing wisdom and cracking wise. Now in her 17th year as executive director of the Citizens Campaign for the Environment, Adrienne is a lobbying and public-education force across Long Island and Connecticut, with groundwater protection, carbon reduction, coastal fortification and a host o...
Mar 29, 2021•29 min•Season 1Ep. 3
For all intents and purposes, America’s COVID-19 pandemic started in New York. That put Nassau County-based Northwell Health, the state’s largest healthcare system and the nation’s 14th largest, on the front lines from Day One. Leading that fight is CEO Michael Dowling, who turned Northwell into New York State’s largest private employer – and steered Northwell through the crisis – leveraging lessons learned in the hardscrabble Irish village of his youth, in Albany’s corridors of power and over 2...
Mar 29, 2021•32 min•Season 1Ep. 2
Anyone who’s done Long Island business over the last quarter century knows Marlene McDonnell – the former events director for Long Island Business News, the two-decade member of the Long Island Business Development Council (including a long stint as LIBDC administrator and Executive Board member) and the president of Innovate Long Island. Marlene, of course, took over when Innovate LI founder John Kominicki – her longtime business partner and mentor – passed suddenly in 2017. Since then, she’s h...
Mar 29, 2021•28 min•Season 1Ep. 1
