Tratner to speak at inventors meeting

SANDPOINT — Alan Tratner is not just a professor, inventor and entrepreneur, he has also mentored and assisted thousands of green technology, sustainable ecology and energy companies and inventors.

Tratner, who is the featured speaker for the November Inventors Association of Idaho meeting via Skype next week, was also one of the original founders of Earth Day in 1970, and has 13 inventions/patents of his own. Tratner, who is also an artist, started his talents early in life — with plenty of encouragement from his parents.

His parents told him the first thing he did, from an artistic standpoint, was draw the head of a snake on one piece of paper. Then he took 50 pieces of paper and drew the body and the tail across all the sheets of paper and assembled the pieces along the floor of the family's Detroit, Mich., home.

"And that's how I looked at the world," Tratner said.

Also as a kid, Tratner said he entered a competition held by General Motors. The purpose of the competition was to design and build a car of the future. Tratner built and designed one in his shop class in junior high that won him an honorable mention and a spot in the Detroit news. The next year, he developed another one that the judges said was "incredible." They took him under their wing, and as a junior high student, he was out with "world class" engineers and designers.

His family, who believed in his talents, he said, picked up and moved to California, where he studied at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.

Among his long list of accomplishments, Tratner is the international director of Green2Gold, a project of the nonprofit Environmental Education Group. Tratner founded the Green2Gold project, which holds workshops and facilitates incubators for sustainable enterprises to foster new renewable energy technologies and green products and services around the world — a Green2Gold incubator is a learning/teaching facility where new companies are mentored into successful, profitable operation. 

Tratner is also the voluntary international president of the Inventors Workshop International and Entrepreneurs Workshop. The Inventors Workshop International has helped more than 30,000 members and realized tens of thousands U.S. patents, new products, and technologies.

More of Tratner's accomplishments include serving as director of the Small Business Entrepreneurship Center in California, a SCORE consultant, and was publisher of the Lightbulb Journal and INVENT! magazines. He is a former professor of environment and energy, participated in the first international United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm Sweden, was a staff member of Environmental Quality Magazine and founded the Environmental Education Group Foundation.

He traveled the country conducting Ultimate Crisis and Solutions for Survival seminars, and led an environmental and alternative energy delegation to the former Soviet Union for the Citizen’s Ambassador Program. He was editor of Energies Journal for the Solar Energy Society of America, published the Geothermal Energy magazine and Geothermal World Directory. In the 1990s, Tratner became director of the Green Business Conference of the ECO EXPO, created the Eco Inventors and Eco Entrepreneurs workshops, and the New Environmental Technologies Exhibits.

In 2012, Tratner was inducted into the International Green Industries Hall of Fame and honored with Lifetime Achievement.

During Tratner's talk, titled "Cashing in on Great Ideas," he will answer questions, as well as provide some props of different inventions for discussion, such as the process that garnered success of those products.

"When you help the tens of thousands of people that we've had over the time that we've existed globally, you learn what shouldn't be done and you sure learn what should be done, and there are no absolute guarantees about any of this stuff," Tratner said.

Because of his own start in inventing at a young age, Tratner said he believes in STEM and works with kids to encourage them to invent and develop their ideas, particularly when it comes to sustainability and green ideas.

"I think we could avoid a lot of grief on this planet if we encourage kids early on to follow their creative dreams and their ambitions and talents," Tratner said.

The IAoI group will meet at 2 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 1, in the second-floor conference room of the Columbia Bank building, 414 Church St. The group will hold its regular mixer afterward for mingling and learning from experts.

Mary Malone can be reached by email at mmalone@bonnercountydailybee.com and follow her on Twitter @MaryDailyBee.