Fortnightly Top Innovators 2018
Gary Stockbridge is Region President – Atlantic City Electric and Delmarva Power. Mike Poncia is Vice President – Customer Operations, Pepco Holdings. Tracy Orledge is Business Analyst, Pepco Holdings.
Steve Mitnick is Editor-in-Chief of Public Utilities Fortnightly and President of Lines Up, Inc.
PUF: How did this idea come up of using individuals on the Autism spectrum to work on special projects?
Gary Stockbridge: This has roots back to 2012. Then governor Jack Markell, in Delaware, assumed his role as chair of the National Governors Association. His Chair initiative was: "A better bottom line employing people with disabilities."
[Editor's note: see Jack Markell's interview on the essence of innovation later in this issue of PUF.]
We worked closely with the governor to get that word out to the business community within the state and talk about how the business community could support this initiative.
Ernie Dianastasis was also engaged early on with this initiative and eventually founded The Precisionists, Inc., or TPI, who's our key partner on this. We worked with Ernie and some of his first employees with Autism. TPI evaluated these employees to understand the type of work that they would be best at and matched it to the work we do day to day.
PUF: How does this work?