A Translational Research Program for Sustainable Technology, Durable Systems, and Upward Mobility in Appalachia
I have spent most of my working life around people who run small businesses. Bricklayers, restaurant owners, property managers and developers, contractors, small family-owned manufacturing shops. I have paid close attention over the years to what works for the people running these places and what does not. Listened when they were willing to teach me.
And the lesson has been close to universal. The systems they rely on, the software, the buildings, the supply chains, the infrastructure underneath all of it, almost always have room for improvement. Things that should be simple get complicated. Things that should serve people end up demanding from them. People I admire spend their evenings untangling problems their tools and systems were supposed to solve.
That has bothered me for a long time, because none of it had to be that way.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
I was taught as a kid to keep it simple, stupid. Three of the most useful words anyone ever gave me. I have applied that discipline to brick walls, to building maintenance, to print shop operations, and now to software. The materials change. The principle does not. Build it for the people who have to use it. Sequence it correctly. Do not skip the foundation. Keep it simple.
What DhyanaResearch Is
DhyanaTech is an innovation solutions company. We design and build sustainable technology, broadly defined, for the people and places that have been underserved by the current way of doing things. And today we are announcing the next chapter of that work: DhyanaResearch, a translational research program studying how to make systems work better for working people, the small businesses they run, and the regions they call home.
Translational research is a particular kind of work. It takes findings that usually live in academic journals and turns them into solutions that real people can actually use. It is research that has to land in someone's hands to count. That is the work we are doing. Software designed by listening carefully to the people who use it. Buildings and infrastructure that can stand up to a changing climate, including foundations that float when the water rises. Social science research on what actually drives upward mobility for working people in Appalachia, where so much policy gets written about us and so little gets written with us. These look like different fields from a distance. Up close, they are the same problem. How do we build durable, sustainable, well-designed systems for the people who need them most.
The Right Place at the Right Time
A few years ago, this kind of cross-disciplinary work required a research university and a war chest. That has changed. The tools have matured to where a solo founder or a small co-founder team can do real work across software, design, and social science, with the time and attention each deserves. I happened to be in the right place at the right time to learn how to use those tools well. DhyanaTech happens to be in the right place at the right time to build something durable with them. Luck is preparation meeting timing, the saying goes, and I believe it.
What that timing makes possible, for a company our size, is that we can do this work the right way. Slowly. Carefully. With the time it actually takes to listen, to study, to iterate. That is what DhyanaResearch is for. It is the long-term foundation underneath everything else we build.
What We Are After
What we are after is straightforward. Software and systems that simplify operations rather than complicating them. Buildings designed for the climate that is actually coming, not the one we are nostalgic for. Research that takes the lived experience of working people in Appalachia seriously enough to use it as a starting point. All of it pointed at the same outcome: giving small business owners and founders and the people working alongside them their brains back at the end of the day, so they can spend the evening with their families instead of fighting their tools and their circumstances.
In the coming weeks we will be publishing the founding manifesto of this work, Technology From Where We Stand. It lays out the program in full: what we are studying, what we are committing to, who we want to work with, and the case for why Knoxville and the wider Appalachian region are the right place to be doing this work. We will share it here when it is ready.
Get Involved
If you are a small business owner with thoughts about the systems you use, we want to hear from you. If you are a researcher whose work intersects with software, sustainable design, climate resilience, or economic mobility in our region, we want to talk. If you are part of the Knoxville and East Tennessee ecosystem and you see a fit between this program and what you are building, please reach out. This work does not belong to DhyanaTech alone. It belongs to whoever cares about the question and is willing to contribute in good faith.
Built to Last
My grandfather and my father were bricklayers. They taught me that there is a right way to build a thing, and that the right way takes longer up front and saves a lot of trouble later. Software, buildings, infrastructure, the systems people depend on every day. The principle is the same. Keep it simple. Build it to last. Build it for the people who actually have to live with it.
Stay in the work.
— Steve Dickens, Co-Founder & CTO, DhyanaTech Inc.