Spark: The InnovateLI Podcast

Marc Alessi may be the most diversified jewel of Long Island’s innovation crown. He’s a lawyer, ex-lawmaker, executive, entrepreneur, ace networker and – perhaps most importantly – a true visionary, with a clear notion of Long Island’s best socioeconomic destiny and a roadmap to get there. As executive director of the Business Incubator Association of New York State (BIANYS), he’s giving the futur...

Walter Stockton was born, raised and educated in Pennsylvania – but Long Island is his home and, thanks to his efforts, home to thousands of developmentally disabled Islanders who might otherwise wind up in an institutional horror house, or worse. The founder of the Independent Group Home Living Program – and now the Kinexion Network, an umbrella management-service organization for a half-dozen ma...

Robert Zimmerman has been a household name on Long Island and beyond for decades, for all the right reasons – brilliant innovation across the professional-communications spectrum, fantastic business success, unblinking political commentary at the highest levels, compassionate crusades for numerous humanitarian causes. Now he’s Victim No. 1 of a political crime that redefines sad, seedy and scary –...

Ernie Canadeo is a dynamo of digital advertising, a champion of regional entertainment and quite possibly the most interesting man in Long Island innovation. The founder and CEO of Melville-based integrated advertising agency The EGC Group and chairman of the Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Fame has built a successful career around big names, big ideas and a lifelong love of great musi...

“Downtowns” and “Main Street USA” are 100-year-old concepts that can be easily lost in the modern shuffle. But while the personalities of downtown districts and main street markets have changed, their importance hasn’t. These lessons are paramount to Eric Alexander, the longtime director of Vision Long Island and founder of the Long Island Main Street Alliance. Through 25 years of planning and lob...

The genius researcher, oft-published innovator and “father of bioelectronic medicine” spearheads a field of study that promises to permanently rewrite the medical textbooks: electric nerve stimulation. Offering drug-free alternatives for the treatment of inflammation throughout the body – and the diseases and other conditions causing it – bioelectronic medicine attracts top minds and huge investme...

Like many creative geniuses, Christian Gonzalez borrowed liberally from established works when he created “The Macabre Sessions” – in this case, from the best of the horror and science-fiction genres. But if the young digital artist mined Stephen King’s worst nightmares for inspiration, the end result – an original audio story set on Long Island, told over 13 super-creepy episodes with a full voic...

After 21 years as president of ERASE Racism, founder Elaine Gross has handed the baton – and a two-decade legacy of litigious success and social progress – to a worthy successor. The Long Island-raised Boston University graduate has made a career of racial justice in housing, education and other key areas, taking a graceful approach to an ongoing street fight that continuously exposes the ugly und...

Andrew Parton was a banker before he landed at the Cradle of Aviation Museum, but no ordinary banker – the St. John’s University MBA had already carved a decades-long career in major-league marketing for some of the nation’s leading financial institutions. That experience – and his childhood love of air and space, fueled equally by “Star Trek” and real-life NASA missions – made him the perfect per...

Long Island is blessed with a multitude of world-class colleges and universities and an impressive roster of all-world scholars to run them – and right at the top is Dr. John Nader, President of Farmingdale State College. A veteran of the SUNY system and former mayor of the City of Oneonta, John – who doubles as co-chairman of the critically influential Long Island Regional Economic Development Co...

Raised by strong women with long careers in professional healthcare, Dawn Smallwood seemed destined to become a doctor. She even went to college to study biology. But fate had other ideas. In January, the veteran law-enforcement officer – after decades in the service of the FBI, the NCIS and CUNY Public Safety – became chief of the Stony Brook University Police Department, the first woman to fill...

With some estimates counting more than 218,000 food-insecure Long Islanders, including 80,000 children, the Herculean efforts of Chief Executive Officer Paule Pachter and his team at Long Island Cares-The Harry Chapin Food Bank cannot be overstated. The former deputy commissioner of the Nassau County Department of Mental Health, who earned a master’s degree in social work from Adelphi University,...

Robert Catell is a living legend of the regional energy sector and an iconic influencer, across Long Island and beyond. Starting as a junior engineer for Brooklyn Union Gas way back in 1958, Robert rose quickly through the ranks, prioritizing modernization and energy efficiency at every step. A savvy and respected leader, he was a key player in a multibillion-dollar merger that forever reshaped re...

John Wallace needs no introduction to fans of the Syracuse Orange or the New York Knicks – but you might not know how deeply the Rochester native’s roots run throughout New York State. Since hanging up his professional sneakers, the one-time NCAA scoring machine has embarked on numerous professional and personal efforts designed to empower youth and promote social justice. A master communicator wi...

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 a...

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 do...

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, conservatio...

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 sensationalis...

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 w...

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 acquisitio...

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 nationa...

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 consultancie...

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...

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 mas...

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...