Jessica O. Matthews became an inventor, entrepreneur and CEO of her own company by 22. She has developed award-winning solutions to sustainable infrastructure and consulted the U.S. government on environmental policy. Today, nearly two decades later, she is the founder and CEO of Lived Labs, where she works to make invention more practical, accessible and culturally relevant for everyone. In her keynote speech at NeoCon this year, she explained why finding something to fight for is the most important step toward meaningful innovation.
Her fight started when she was 17, attending a family wedding in Nigeria. During the wedding, the venue lost power. Power-loss is a common, near daily occurrence across the country, so her Nigerian-born cousins were prepared with a diesel generator. Matthews, a dual citizen born and raised in New York, was not prepared for the situation.
With the power running, the event continued, but due to the diesel fumes, Matthews began to feel ill. She told one of her Nigerian cousins how she was feeling, and the next phrase she heard changed her life forever. “You’ll get used to it,” he replied, regarding fumes that were surely causing lifelong health problems for people across the country. That phrase planted a seed that would first yield fruit two years later, while Matthews was enrolled at Harvard University.
“The biggest mistake we have made is deciding a small part of society will solve all of our problems,” she said. Matthews explained that there is a gap between people experiencing problems and people who are capable or tasked to fix them. According to her, everything starts when the problem becomes personal. For Matthews, it meant showing her family in Nigeria that they could play a role in creating a better world.
Halfway through her time at Harvard, her family overseas had just lost three members to tragedies; health problems all caused or worsened by the failures of Nigerian infrastructure. Matthews remembered the diesel fumes two years before, and the phrase so casually spoken by her cousin. She was not willing to get used to it. At 19, she turned a hamster ball and a shake-to-start flashlight into the Soccket, a soccer ball that generates kinetic energy and turns it into light. It was her first invention, an alternative to diesel generators, and a life-changing resource for thousands of people.
Though the events were triggered by a series of tragedies, Matthews speaks of the time with pride. It was then that she found her fight and began her career as an inventor. How did she do it? By taking things personally, because when Matthews cares about a problem, she works tirelessly to fix it.
She believes that reliable, sustainable infrastructure is a basic human right. Matthews believes it so deeply that she worked for 15 years to deliver solutions around the globe. Now, she has shifted her focus, using her origin story to create actionable steps for anyone to become an innovator. She works to answer the question, “What if others can have what I have?”
Matthews recognized that her years of success are a framework that will help people bridge the gap between problems and unrealized solutions. She is guided by the belief that innovation is an innate ability, awakened by the fight that arises when people start taking things personally. As a storyteller, she is using her lived experiences to reach potential problem solvers. As the founder and CEO of Lived Labs, she is providing access, resources and a community for other innovators.
So how does a story become a solution? “Take the mundane and apply it to something that doesn’t seem relevant,” said Matthews, because “innovation is often like pattern matching.” While serving on an advisory board for Disney, she was asked to solve a complex networking issue. They needed to find a way to route large amounts of power to multiple places without losing energy.
Like spokes on a wheel, Matthews said her mother keeps everyone in her family informed. She identified that the networking issue at Disney could be solved the same way. With quick ingenuity, she invented the “Mother Node,” a central hub that can decide when and where energy is needed. It solved the problem for Disney and is now cited more than 45 times by major communication companies.
Simply stated, Matthews is a master innovator. Her contributions to sustainable infrastructure have made a global impact, improving many lives. As a CEO, she adapts her skills as an inventor to her leadership and mentorship. Her intent? To usher in the next generation of gamechangers. From her 16-year career and her keynote speech, her unwavering faith in the abilities of others is abundantly clear. Matthews believes that “innovation is the best chance we have to solve the complex problems of the world.” She is determined to make those solutions available to anyone with something to fight for.