The Inside Memphis Business 2022 Innovation Awards

Honoring the very best in local innovation.

Just look around town, and you’ll see something new and exciting. Memphis has long been a hub for innovators, a space that cultivates creativity and constantly pushes thinkers and creators forward until they reach that elusive lightbulb moment. In 2022, for our tenth annual Innovation Awards, Inside Memphis Business features four progress-minded individuals who are showcasing Memphis’ continued evolution through innovation. And like every year, we had plenty of candidates to choose from, spanning industries as diverse as philanthropy and medicine.  

This year, we recognize Roshun Austin and The Works’ efforts to combat Memphis food deserts, West Cancer Center’s Drs. Michael Berry and Richard Fine’s use of AI imaging technology to assist with breast cancer surgery, Idicula Mathew and Hera Health Solutions’ unique approach to contraceptives via a biodegradable arm implant, and Howard Robertson’s digital home for all manner of Black-owned radio stations and podcasts. They’re all worthy winners in their own right, and are doing their utmost to move Memphis forward. — Samuel X. Cicci

The Works’ Mobile Food Grocer

A new mobile grocer moves within food deserts in North Memphis to provide fresh groceries and revitalize neighborhoods.

A healed femur, twentieth-century anthropologist Margaret Mead declared, was the first sign of civilization. It meant that someone had carried another to safety, fed them, and tended to their needs, while that person, unable to walk, rested for six weeks. It was this act of caring, this act of community, she decided, that distinguishes humans from the beasts that roam the earth.

Since those very first signs of humanity, however, “We forgot how to be civilized,” says Roshun Austin, president and CEO of The Works Inc. “We said some of our people get to live in squalor.” An anthropologist by training, Austin saw the effects of this thinking, having grown up in poverty in South Memphis, and she now works to counteract the situation in her professional life. “I always refer to my work as going back to the beginning, back to the basics of building shelter and locating food sources.”

The Works Inc. started in 1998 with a focus on affordable housing, but about 12 years ago, two years before Austin took on her role, the organization entered the food-security arena. “That work grew out of a comprehensive neighborhood plan,” she says. “It’s not just about building physical structures. If we’re not building up people, we’re not building up community.”

Part of this arose from The Works’ focus on community engagement. “We need to ask questions about what people want in our neighborhoods,” Austin explains. “I don’t know what people want until they tell me their desires.” And the people The Works serves wanted and needed access to quality food.

Dubbed the “Hunger Capital” of the U.S. by The Guardian, Memphis is dotted with food deserts, typically low-income areas without grocery stores for nearby residents and instead dominated by the limited and often less nourishing options of convenience stores and fast-food outlets. In South Memphis, particularly, The Works aimed to address this problem by creating the South Memphis Farmers Market in 2010 as a way to provide fresh groceries. In 2014, The Works built a year-round, brick-and-mortar grocery store, The Grocer, by the Farmers Market at 1400 Mississippi Blvd., with goods sold at affordable prices for the low-income community it serves.

The Grocer also houses The Kitchen, which offers free cooking classes with lessons on nutrition, smart grocery shopping, and nutritionally rich recipes. “The reason we ended up with The Kitchen,” says Austin, “is that we also discovered that our ZIP code at the time, 38106, had the lowest life expectancy in Shelby County. The difference was 13 years between us and Collierville east of us. A lot of it was metabolic and diet-related, and so we needed to address not just [Memphians’] access to produce, but how they prepare it.”

This work drew the attention of The Guardian, which in 2019 made a mini-documentary about The Works as part of its online Divided Cities series. In turn, the documentary drew the attention of nearby Kroger executives, who introduced Austin to the concept of what would become The Works’ next initiative: a mobile grocery store.

Ultimately, Austin says of this work, “We don't want to be in that business long-term. Ideally, we are revitalizing neighborhoods to attract full-service grocers.”

In January 2020, Austin met with Kroger corporate officials based in Louisville, and they showed her their grocery store on wheels. The idea originated from a food bank in Wisconsin, she says. “And I’m like, ‘Why in the world haven’t you brought that to Memphis?’” From that moment, the plan was to partner with Kroger to bring a mobile grocery store to Memphis. “But then there’s a pandemic.”

After months of supply-chain issues and hesitation on Kroger’s end, The Works embarked on the project on their own with funding from philanthropic partners. They placed a down payment on a trailer, hired a commercially licensed driver, and found a heavy-duty Ford F-450 pickup truck to tow everything. After two more years of supply-chain woes and outfitting the trailer to store all the food properly, the Mobile Food Grocer made its first stop in the Klondike Smokey City neighborhood on October 12th of this year.

Since then, the mobile grocer has phased in other stops in North Memphis neighborhoods. Eventually, Austin says, the grocer will do two stops a day, five days a week, at 10 locations. “It’s open to anybody in those communities.”

Like The Grocer, the mobile store partnered with Rick James, owner and CEO of Castle Retail Group, as a supplier, so that the products can be sold at Cash Saver’s affordable prices. The Works also offers an incentive program for purchasing produce, where the organization will place up to $20 on a reloadable card for every $20 SNAP recipients spend on produce. For seniors, who do not receive SNAP, the organization will match up to $10.

Ultimately, Austin says of this work, “We don't want to be in that business long-term. Ideally, we are revitalizing neighborhoods to attract full-service grocers.” Until then — until civilization returns to its core of compassion — The Works will continue listening to and building up the communities it serves. — Abigail Morici

West Cancer Center

West Cancer Center team uses AI tech to find better outcomes for breast cancer patients.

The war against cancer is waged on many fronts, and a team at West Cancer Center is at the forefront of a key battle.

Dr. Michael Berry and Dr. Richard Fine are breast surgeons at Margaret West Comprehensive Breast Center. It’s common for patients with breast cancer to undergo breast-conserving surgery called a lumpectomy. The operation leaves the healthy breast intact, compared to a mastectomy, which involves removal of the entire breast. The goal of a lumpectomy is to remove all the cancer while preserving as much tissue as possible.

Fine describes the challenge: “For a lumpectomy to be successful, there must be a rim of healthy tissue around the removed cancerous tumor, referred to as a clean or negative margin. After surgery, the cancerous tissue is sent to pathology for microscopic evaluation to confirm whether any cancer cells remain, which takes several days. If the pathology report finds positive margins — meaning cancer cells were still detected — the surgeon typically must bring the patient back for another surgery to remove more tissue.”

For Fine and Berry, the partnership with Perimeter Medical Imaging allowed them to be the first team in the Mid-South to investigate this option that, if successful, could make a significant difference to patients.

Even with new technology and skilled surgeons, there is still about a 1 in 5 chance that the patient will need a repeat surgery. In an effort to bring down that ratio, the Clinical Research Department at West Cancer Center has begun working with technology from Perimeter Medical Imaging.

“Optical Coherence Tomography [OCT] is a light-based imaging method to identify evidence of cancer cells near the edge, or margin, of the tumor during surgery,” Fine says. “With a resolution 10 times that of ultrasound and X-ray, and 100 that of MRI, it can visualize margins at the cellular level, especially beneficial for difficult-to-detect cancers.”

OCT is non-invasive and provides images of subsurface tissue structures. The use of light instead of sound allows better resolution than an ultrasound. It can, in real time, visualize blood vessels, ducts, glands, and surrounding structures. 

West Cancer Center is the first clinical trial site to test a new version of the technology. Fine says, “This trial is evaluating the use of artificial intelligence software to support the surgeon’s clinical decision-making in the operating room during the initial surgery versus waiting several days for the pathology report to come back. This could help reduce the likelihood of having patients return for a second surgery due to cancer left behind.”

Innovation is crucial to expanding the impact of cancer research. The clinical trial headed by Fine and Berry will help evaluate how the AI and imaging technology stacks up against current standards of care for breast cancer patients. If the trial goes as researchers hope, then a new standard of care could emerge. Furthermore, if this is the case, then the OCT technology could be used to take on a variety of other cancers.

The challenge for the trial is making the technology available universally. “Because this is still in a study program, the number of patients eligible to participate is limited,” Fine says. “Our West network is proud to be one of the few clinical trial sites across the country to offer this technology.”

For Fine and Berry, the partnership with Perimeter Medical Imaging allowed them to be the first team in the Mid-South to investigate this option that, if successful, could make a significant difference to patients. — Jon W. Sparks

Hera Health Solutions

Hera Health Solutions’ biodegradable implant Eucontra changes the game for contraceptives.

Safe, discreet, and long-lasting. Those are the key words Idicula Mathew has focused on for years when it comes to creating a unique contraceptive. As co-founder and CEO of Hera Health Solutions, he’s spent the past couple of years developing Eucontra, a new approach to birth control. Unlike conventional arm implants, there’s one key difference: Hera’s is designed to be biodegradable within the body. Currently pending FDA approval, Eucontra is set to provide a safe and long-lasting birth control alternative around the globe.

Mathew first came up with the idea in 2015 while studying as a material sciences researcher at Georgia Tech, and calls the research-to-startup process “serendipity” for the way his ideas came together. As part of his program, he spent 20 hours a week in the local Atlanta emergency health department and saw many implant-removal procedures go awry.

“I worked at the place where people would have birth control arm implants removed,” he recalls. “The radiology department was where they’d send anyone who had adverse effects or complications during the explantation process, and I kept seeing these issues over and over again. Scarring, implant migration within the body, and it was expensive to fix these problems.”

At the same time, Mathew studied in a material science lab that worked on bio-erodible polymers for medical devices, and he noticed that they weren’t being used in a way that would aid drug delivery. If he could fit these two puzzle pieces together, it could create a safer, more accessible way to provide contraceptive access.

“There are companies pursuing this kind of technology, but we’re one of the few in this space that are using materials already approved by the FDA. Developing a new drug could take anywhere from 10 to 20 years to get approval, so we’re ahead of the game.” — Idicula Mathew

“It became the question of, ‘Hey, there’s a problem in this space. How do we fix it?’” he says. “And I felt like the answer was there in front of my face, but we still had to take the concept of bio-erodible polymers and figure out how to successfully deliver a drug.”

He ran with the idea and eventually founded Hera Health Solutions in 2018, with the goal of creating a biodegradable drug delivery implant that could be used for a wide variety of medical conditions. Originally based in Atlanta, Hera applied to the ZeroTo510 medical startup program in Memphis. As a condition for participating, the company had to move its headquarters to the Bluff City. Mathew agreed, and quickly plugged into Memphis’ medical ecosystem, making connections with new professionals and investors.

Hera’s flagship product, Eucontra, has been the company’s main focus so far. Key to its quick success has been Mathew’s use of FDA-approved biodegradable polymers with active pharmaceutical ingredients. “What we’ve done is create from the ground up a drug delivery mechanism from these polymers that can deliver therapeutics to the body for a long period of time,” he says.

“If you think about it, this is a space that doesn’t see a lot of innovation. Most companies quickly package drugs into either oral or injectable factors. And that’s a big issue when it comes to therapeutics that need to constantly be in the bloodstream for an extended period of time to be effective.” As of now, Eucontra is designed to dispense the current market’s generic contraceptive (in this case, etonogestrel) over a 12- to 16-month period. But as Hera continues developing its drug delivery technology, that time period can be adjusted, depending on which drug is used.

Eucontra is currently pending FDA approval, but Mathew is optimistic that it could earn approval as early as 2024 or 2025. Early meetings have shown that Eucontra is safe and effective, which significantly reduces the timeline. “There are companies pursuing this kind of technology,” he says, “but we’re one of the few in this space that are using materials already approved by the FDA. Developing a new drug could take anywhere from 10 to 20 years to get approval, so we’re ahead of the game.”

And that early success has caught the eye of pharmaceutical companies around the globe, including in countries like Spain and South Korea. That plays into the ultimate global vision that Mathew sees for the company and the technology.

“Innovation in the pharmaceutical realm can lead to better outcomes for patients,” says Mathew. “It’s all in the service of making new and existing therapeutics easier to access for people, or making it safer than current delivery methods.” In terms of Eucontra, eliminating the need for an implant’s invasive removal procedure avoids the painful and expensive complications that Mathew witnessed, and provides a much safer global alternative for women in areas that may lack access to reliable healthcare.

“We’re going to be able to help a lot of people,” he says. “We’re working towards innovation in the pharmaceutical realm. We’re excited to be a part of it, and hopefully we’ll help new and existing therapeutics be more beneficial for users worldwide.” — Samuel X. Cicci

Howard Robinson / Play ODE

A new app provides a unique digital home for Black-owned AM radio stations and podcasts.

Back in his twenties, Howard Robertson landed a job that has shaped his aesthetics and his ethics ever since: He became a publicist for the legendary Stax Records. He’s grateful he didn’t stick with his original plan of going to law school. “It was the greatest first job out of college anybody ever had, and it beat the absolute stew out of going to law school,” he says now. “I was only at Stax for a couple years, but it was life-changing. Deanie Parker was my boss, and she taught me things that I use yet today.”

Robertson is now the CEO/principal of Trust Marketing & Communications, Inc., a venture that he and his wife, Beverly, first imagined while strolling on a Florida beach in 1988, but that barely scratches the surface of all he’s involved in. Indeed, he’s played and listened to music all his life, and, ever since his stint as sales manager for Memphis station WLOK, radio as well. Those twin passions are at the heart of his most recent innovation: the Play ODE app.

The unique platform is designed to be a portal to radio stations and podcasts programmed for the Black community. As Robertson explains, its genesis was at a 2018 conference of the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters (NABOB), where he attended a session about African Americans’ growing reliance on digital devices for their radio listening. “In that room, I saw radio station owners and broadcasters that owned AM radio stations, and I knew that they were quite literally the walking dead. Because young people don’t know what AM radio is, or how to access it. So it bothered me that they did not have a digital footprint, or a bridge to digital. And I’ve always been one to want to find a creative way to figure it out. So I left there and went to a cigar bar, and I stayed in there for about seven hours. I went in with a problem and came out with a plan. That’s when I came up with the concept of ODE.”

Next year is the 75th anniversary of Black radio; the first Black format radio station was WDIA, in 1948. I dearly love radio and Black radio, so I wanted to be part of a solution, in terms of their being able to not just survive, but to thrive. That’s what the ODE platform allows us to do.” — Howard Robinson

The app, first released seven months ago, ties together many causes Robertson is passionate about. “ODE is an acronym for Our Digital Entertainment,” he says. “We’re a Black radio app, providing Black radio with the same sense of legacy and purpose that Black radio I grew up with here in Memphis had. And that is to super-serve the community, to provide the best in Black entertainment, music, information, and news. So we stream radio stations in various Black-appeal formats. We have hip hop, R&B, gospel, smooth jazz, talk, and sports. And these are some of the best Black radio stations in the country, from a diversity of locations: Atlanta, Chicago, New Orleans, Memphis, Miami, Dallas, Kansas City. We’re starting out with about a dozen, and then we’ll add more.”

As Robertson sees it, this helps preserve some of the diversity that’s disappearing as radio ownership and programming has become more profit-driven. “We have a diversity of formats, including formats that a lot of markets are not deep in, or that don’t exist at all anymore. One that I love is smooth jazz. There used to be a plethora of smooth jazz stations out there, but now they’re few and far between. And on the ODE app, we’ve got some phenomenal ones. One in Atlanta, one in Augusta, and one in Springfield, Massachusetts.”

ODE also offers Black-oriented podcasts, something Robertson also knows something about, having co-hosted the popular Riffin’ On Jazz show with the recently departed Malvin Massey for many years. Now ODE includes that show, not to mention More Than That with Gia Peppers, Three Black Chicks, R&R on Sports, and Blues in the Basement.

Ultimately, Robertson traces the spirit of ODE to values he saw every day while working at Stax. “They were super-serving the Black community,” he says. “And Stax did that as a privately owned business, with so much devotion and commitment and dedication to Memphis, especially when it came to Black radio. And that is my motivation for ODE. Next year is the 75th anniversary of Black radio; the first Black format radio station was WDIA, in 1948. I dearly love radio and Black radio, so I wanted to be part of a solution, in terms of their being able to not just survive, but to thrive. That’s what the ODE platform allows us to do.”  — Alex Greene