Open Innovation and the contribution of non-experts
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Computer animation
Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:16
So thank you all. I am quite delighted to be here.
00:21
And here we go. Looking forward to the next few days, lots to learn, and a really great lineup of speakers. So what I'm going to talk about today is open innovation and the contribution of non-experts. And there's some definitional work that needs to happen for this.
00:44
So my primary goal here is to define open innovation as tied to non-experts. And I am using a specific definition of non-expert. It's not about whether or not you're good at something. So it's about lacking official credentials, being unaccredited, not being recognized by institutions
01:04
as being an expert in a particular field. So this is an important distinction in part because what I want to do is I want to draw attention to the invisibility of non-experts and their contributions and try to surface that in the hopes of understanding how we can cultivate more innovation and particularly more
01:22
disruptive innovation. So I look at three communities. I look at hackers, makers, and students, both hardware and software hackers. And the reason I throw students in there is I'm talking about undergraduates sort of before they become credentialed. I call them hackers because they have the audacity
01:42
to think that they can make a difference even when the institution basically wants to tell them that they're not ready to do anything substantive. And so across these three communities, the collective ability to contribute to innovation is what I'm really interested in these days. Sort of odd to talk about hackers here in Berlin, which is kind of like the epicenter of everything
02:01
going on, but it's also great to be here. So there are three elements to this discussion. And so the first is a book that I'm writing on the topic about hackers and disruptive technology. The second is a project that I'm running at my university called Hackademia, which is an attempt to foster more innovation by non-experts to come up with a model for that.
02:21
And then the third element is something that I'll talk about a little later. So the reason I'm using this particular definition of non-expert in terms of the credentialing issue is because I'm talking specifically about the limitations of institutions, both academic and business institutions,
02:41
how they themselves are credentialed, what they value and the structures that they evolve, which ultimately end up squelching innovation. And so this is also part of a larger project to think about how to revolutionize higher education in light of technological change. So I've been working in places like that,
03:02
actually not usually as pretty as that, but in educational institutions for about 20 years teaching at universities, and they have a lot of boundaries. And in the same way that say technology has really reframed journalism, that change is coming for higher ed. And by and large, I would say most universities,
03:21
kind of like ostriches, they're ignoring the change that's coming, and so trying to daylight some of that. Anyway, so institutions have boundaries, and you can counter pose those boundaries and that closeness to the idea of openness and open innovation, okay? So this talk is, so you can see this talk about the power of open innovation, but the flip side of that
03:41
is also about the limitations of institutions. So the, all right, I have two bottles of water and I guarantee one will end up on the ground.
04:04
Okay, so I do have a little confession that I have to lay out here. I was rehearsing this talk with a friend of mine earlier this week, and she said, you know, you really need to tell them a little bit about your background, which is, I don't, really, just not my first impulse. So I am a professor.
04:20
I am a professor in a college of engineering, and I am a full professor, which means in the American education system, there are no more promotions that I can get. I'm done, which is great, great place to be. But while I am a professor in engineering, and I do have a PhD, but my PhD is actually in literature.
04:43
So that's my confession there. So I sort of operate in this world where I don't have the official credentials to do what it is that I do in my day job, and so the sort of evolving conflicts there, I think, inform a lot of what this project is about. Okay, so it's become obvious over time
05:01
that experts aren't necessarily the best problem solvers, and on one level, we know this, right? We all know this, but as a society, we don't operate as if we know it, and certainly universities don't operate like they know this, and by and large, neither do businesses. So experts may not be the best problem solvers,
05:22
and that means that our problem solvers, our best problem solvers don't necessarily come from that population of experts, but we organize our institutions and our processes around the prioritization of expertise, when actually what we need to solve really tough problems is a dose of non-expertise.
05:42
We need a kind of fresh vision. So one of the reasons I wanna recuperate the non-expert as an innovator is because I think that non-expertise is a kind of power. It's freedom from boundaries and the limitations of institutions. Also, non-experts as innovators, they're rule breakers,
06:02
and so in the populations that I look at, well, they are literal rule breakers. There's a lot of laws that get broken in the hacker and maker communities. I'm not passing judgment on the breaking of laws or the justness of certain laws. So there's the literal rule breaking that happens,
06:22
but then the other reason that I like this phrase of rule breaker is because I wanna call attention to it because there is that kind of power play, okay? And it's a political act, it's a seizing of power and pushing back on institutions that give credentials. So for example, open software and open hardware,
06:41
they've changed the nature of the kind of hacking that we can do. Then the problems that we can solve. We don't need a kind of rarefied expertise. There's been a democratization of technological tools and that bolsters the rise of the non-expert innovators. So in a few minutes, you're gonna hear from some of the open challenges and those are also really great opportunities
07:02
to think about how some of these more democratized technologies can allow non-experts to contribute to change. So the other reason that I like to use the phrase rule breaker is because of the cultural and economic power associated with being technical. And this probably does come out of that whole literature
07:22
engineering split. So I use the frame of rule breaking as an act of cultural disruption because it's a matter of people claiming the ability to do things that those formal models of expertise totally exclude and it's powerful for people who don't have credentials to call themselves technical.
07:40
When being technical means something, in terms of your ability to get a job or to be well compensated. So non-experts, rule breaking innovators, got that. But they also contribute specifically to disruptive technologies. Not just innovations, but the creators of particular kinds of technology that tend to be disruptive. And that's really what differentiates them
08:01
from people who operate within institutions. And so the reason why I'm looking at these three communities, because I see them as disruptors outside of those institutions, but also, just as a sort of step back for a moment, I put a bunch of people under the umbrella of hacker. The definition that I'm using,
08:20
I try to avoid definitions actually. I'm much more interested in the commonalities across communities rather than the differences. But the definition is sort of thinking about people who break things and also people who build things. People who look at an object or a system or a process and they don't necessarily get frustrated by the ways it doesn't work for them.
08:41
Instead, they think, well, how can I change this so that it does work for me? And then they hack it, so it works. Another way to think about it is people who don't know any better and so they just make things better. But one of the things also that happens is when you get these non-experts is they don't necessarily understand
09:01
the boundaries of the problem because they are existing outside of expertise and institutions. And so you bring in experts and they really understand the problem and they know how to frame it and what language to use and what the prior work is. Maybe they get a little interdisciplinary. Maybe they sometimes get a little out of the box thinking
09:20
or I guess would this be out of the circle thinking. But for non-experts, they don't actually know how to even articulate the problem and that's where the real power in their solutions often comes from. And that's often really the best pathway that we have to creativity. Okay, so we've got non-experts, rule-breaking innovators of disruptive technology.
09:41
I'm gonna spend a little time on what I mean by disruptive technologies. So this slide is kind of an eye chart. I don't really mean to test your vision. So I'll go ahead and talk through it. But basically the value of the non-experts, so they're outside of institutions like academia or industry, but those institutions, they have very real and tangible disincentives
10:01
for creating disruptive technology. So what you see in front of you, it's a little tiny piece of a model by Clayton Christensen who writes about innovation. He writes about some of the characteristics of disruptive technologies. They have less functionality, tend to be less expensive, built in a user communities. And so if you think about the kind of work
10:21
that and the way work gets done within universities and then also within industry research settings, there's a mismatch. Okay, so in terms of less functionality, the way that universities work is on research dollars, is at least in the US, and increasingly actually globally.
10:42
So if my students, if my graduate students try to do something where they're coming up with a technology that has less functionality than something that's preexisting, that's not gonna constitute new knowledge necessarily. And if it's not new knowledge, I'm not gonna get a grant for it and they're not gonna get a PhD for it. And so my institution is very specifically telling me
11:02
this is not something that we're gonna prioritize. In terms of being less expensive, and this is where I think some of the disincentive in business comes in. So in a few minutes, I'm gonna tell you about a project that some students of mine worked on developing a low cost ultrasound machine. They did an awesome job.
11:21
I'm gonna talk about it at length. But so they came up with a bunch of really great user interface pieces and other terrific elements. And then we shopped it around to manufacturers. We went to Philips, we went to GE, we went to other ultrasound manufacturers and we said, hey, look what we did. We'll give it to you. It's free, take it.
11:41
But we really think that this will help save lives. And they just weren't interested. And eventually in one of the meetings, a vice president said, he said, well, you know, we could make cheaper technology. That's not actually the problem. We have the technology to do that. We can make it cheaper, but it would not support the cost of our sales force.
12:04
So I thought, well, that's a broken model, but it's also a structural disincentive to coming up with disruptive things. And then in terms of new user communities, I mean, they're challenging. So when you think globally, and there's a lot of my work is developing low cost technologies for low resource environments.
12:21
Manufacturing and distribution work differently. Advertising also works differently. And then you may be looking at a high volume, low margin kind of product. It's really challenging. So again, within these institutions, lots of disincentives to come up with something that's disruptive. So one of the other elements I think
12:40
that's really important to pull out of this idea of non-expert communities, so they're rule-breaking innovators, disruptive technology, but they also embrace the idea of technology remix. So it's not necessarily cutting edge research, okay, in well-funded labs where you have access to really expensive and advanced equipment.
13:00
It's often about using older technology in new ways. And so a willingness to engage with this notion of technology remix, which does not fit in to traditional models of practice within institutions, sort of taking things apart, putting them back together in new ways. Maybe there's not any new IP, you're not gonna get any patents where you're gonna add value to your company,
13:22
you're using older stuff, it's not necessarily bleeding edge. All of those things are remix, and it's disruptive. So in the same way that media remixing has been disruptive to conventional schema of copyright and media business models, technology remix is similarly disruptive.
13:41
Okay, so we have this model of disruptive innovation emerging from non-experts, and so I've been collecting these patterns of remix, disruption, and hacking. And this started about 12 years ago. I was doing a bunch of work, doing research on patterns of technology adoption and adaptation globally. And I spent a lot of time in Central Asia,
14:03
did about an eight year study there of how technology was diffused and adopted and adapted. So this was, so back in 2000, sort of just setting the stage here, I was living in Tashkent, and it was a pretty big city, about three million people. And so by December of 2000,
14:20
there were 12 places in the city where you could go to get access to the internet. So there were 12 internet cafes. Theoretically there were ISPs so you could get dial-up in the home, but it wasn't especially accessible. So that's just a little bit about the sort of time and place of what's happening. And within this context, people, they've got to marshal different skills
14:41
in order to figure out how to use this new technology. There's a lot of collective sharing. The slide that you're looking at right now, there's three people huddled around one computer, and what they're doing is they're combining their skill sets, so maybe one person knows how to type, another person has the foreign language ability for what they're trying to learn, and another person might have domain expertise. But combining the skill sets and thinking about what people can do,
15:02
and what can they learn. So one of the things that they can learn is they can learn how to build a LAN. So I was interviewing a group of maybe 14, 15 year olds, probably about 2004 in Kyrgyzstan, and they love to play games. As sort of seems like a universal,
15:21
and they really love to play Counter-Strike. That was their favorite. So in addition to internet cafes, there were a lot of game cafes that they could go to to play at, but it cost money, and also if they wanted to play at night, it was, the parents didn't necessarily want them going out late at night, but they still wanted to play. And they had computers in their home. So what they did, they lived in a big old building like this,
15:41
and they took cabling, and they ran cabling from one apartment, down a few floors, and over a few apartments to the next one, and they hooked themselves up together into a local area network so that they could play Counter-Strike in the middle of the night, and their parents didn't know, which was great for them, but also a really great hack.
16:01
I mean, they didn't have any network engineering background, but they did it. So some of the other hacks that sort of emerged from this pattern of travel is the way that people responded to crumbling infrastructure. So when you have, say, a telephone infrastructure that is somewhat lacking,
16:21
the person who lives off to the side there takes their phone in the middle of the day, during the day, rather, runs it out, hooks it up. If you want to make a call, you go give them a few cents. You make your call, and at night, they take that phone back in. And so that person does not work for the phone company. There's a, it's a completely unsanctioned business
16:40
trying to figure out how to close that telecom gap. So these are some of the patterns. One of my, so that's all stuff from some of my field work. Another great place to see stories like this is off of this website, Afragadget, which I'm sure many of you are familiar with. And so this is their latest, the latest post is about this 13-year-old boy
17:01
who was responsible for taking care of the family's animals, the herd, which is typical. And they live in an area with a lot of lions, and the lions like to eat the cattle because they're tasty. And this boy figured out that when people were out walking with flashlights,
17:20
the lions didn't attack, that it turns out lions are afraid of people, which I did not know. I feel like I am much more afraid of lions than they would be of me. So he came up with this idea to take old LED bulbs from flashlights, hook them up to a car battery along a fence line, and have them go in a regular pattern that would mirror someone walking around.
17:42
And in the months since it's been installed, no lions have eaten their cattle, whereas their neighbors have suffered losses. And so you could actually build a lion-proof fence, which is expensive and time-consuming. And so this kid came up with this amazing hack. All right, so I'm going through, you know, spending a decade or so
18:01
kind of just paying attention to some of the commonalities among hackers in their communities. And about five years into that, I started hanging out with the local hackers in my community. And this wasn't for work, it was just sort of, it was just part of my life.
18:21
And whether it was the hackers in Uzbekistan or the hackers in Seattle, or the students that I was teaching, they were all communities where imagination was much, much more important than knowledge. It was imagination that spurred people to figure out how to learn what they needed to learn, had nothing to do with any kind of official expertise that they had gained.
18:41
So I decided I wanted to figure out what are some of those habits of mind of these people that I termed rule-breakers. You can also think of them as functional engineers, not accredited engineers, but functional. And I decided I wanted to identify and extract those habits of mind from these folks in the interest of helping more people break more rules. So that's really what I want to do,
19:01
is help more people break more rules. So I started looking at individuals and doing some interviews and working on that book that I mentioned. And so people like this guy, this is a story from the US. And this is a guy, he lived in Detroit. He had a shop, and he was really interested in metallurgy. And after many years of working with steel,
19:23
he came up with a new way to harden steel. So traditionally, you heat it for like a week, right, at a temperature. And he came up with a flash heating process. So you heat it for a much shorter period of time, but at a much higher temperature. So the energy savings are enormous, because you're just heating it for a short period,
19:42
but it also ends up being about 7% stronger. So the steel is stronger. And he tried to get the attention of kind of established professionals in the field, and had some challenges there, and did finally get their attention. And there's this great quote from one of the scientists at a university where he finally started working, who said, yeah, you know, steel,
20:02
those of us who work in material science, you know, that's just, it's something we would have considered a mature science. We wouldn't, it would never have occurred to us to actually try to make it better. We figured it was done. So again, the non-experts, sort of not knowing the boundaries of the problem space is able to come up with some really great solutions. And then looking at some of the history
20:20
around all the ways that software hackers break things helps us to also build better things. So better software, better systems, better societies, more transparency, and also more accountability. So I can unpack that sentence. But this is another guy. This is a YouTube video, which you can go,
20:42
I don't have the video linked, but you can go and watch it this evening and impress your friends. It's a party trick of how to get a cork out of an empty wine bottle. This is after you've drunk the wine, obviously. You know, once it's in the bottle, how do you, it's kind of hard to get out. Well, it turns out if you take a plastic bag and you put it in the model
21:01
and you sort of get it around the cork, you hook it around the cork and you pull a little bit. And then if you blow a little bit of air into that plastic bag and you yank, the cork comes out. So you can try that. So there was a guy named Adon, he is a car mechanic in Argentina. And so he was wasting time one afternoon
21:21
watching YouTube videos with his friends in his shop. And he watched this video and watched a couple of times and thought, well, this is really interesting. And I cannot tell you why this is where his mind went, but his mind went after seeing that video to thinking that technique would be great for getting a baby out if there's obstructed labor.
21:41
So now in trials, we have something known as the Adon device, which he came up with the idea from the YouTube trick. And so basically the way it works is kind of like a little plunger and you put it on the baby's head and then you push the plastic bag over the baby's head. There's still an umbilical cord,
22:00
so it's okay that there's a plastic bag over the baby. And then you yank and that's how you get a baby out. And so it turns out in large parts of the world, women give birth at home. And if there are complications, the odds are that either you or your baby is gonna die. So because the time it takes to get someone
22:21
to a health facility where hemorrhage can be stopped, the odds aren't good. So this device is great. It's incredibly low cost. It's so low cost that it can be given out with the safe birthing kits that midwives usually give to mothers when they come in for antenatal visits. So came out of a YouTube video,
22:42
justification for wasting time watching YouTube for all of us. The next example I wanna talk about is from, this is the ultrasound project that I mentioned that some of my students have worked on. So this is a commercial portable ultrasound machine. So there's some sliders on the left
23:02
and then there's a scroll wheel down there. And then there's some soft buttons up top. There's a keyboard and also a track ball. And then there's some extra buttons on the side. I don't know what those do. And then you can see some labels over there, some little yellow stickies that hospital staff added to remind themselves what those buttons do.
23:23
And then sometimes if you go in and you look at an ultrasound machine, you'll see that sonographers have put tape over some of the buttons to remind themselves not to use it, okay. So I teach in a department called Human-Centered Design and Engineering. And the human that uses this has a better brain than I do.
23:41
So it's very complicated. So what happened was a colleague of mine in radiology came to me and he was starting a project working with midwives in Uganda, training them in basic ultrasound to diagnose some pregnancy complications and finding at-risk mothers and referring them to give birth at a health facility so that they wouldn't have to use an Odone device, for example.
24:04
And he said, you know, in the, I don't know about the situation in Germany, but in the U.S. if you want to be a sonographer, you train for two years. Well, they didn't have the resources to do that. So they wanted to bring the midwives in and train them for two weeks, maybe four weeks. And so the idea was, well, how can you,
24:20
can you come up with a less, not just a less expensive, but a simpler to use machine so that two weeks of training might actually, you know, you could actually figure out what you want to, what you need to do. So this is, I had no money, right? So I said, well, we'll just, we'll ask my undergraduate students what they can do because they're fearless. And so they, not knowing the domain
24:40
of the problem space at all, came up with a completely different solution. And so they took an off-the-shelf probe that was available from a company called Innerson. It's older technology. It's not as good as what you'll find in a Philips machine, but it's good enough to diagnose those conditions. And they paired it just with an off-the-shelf netbook. And then they made a really simple to use user interface.
25:04
And, you know, I don't have a picture in this deck, but I was in Kenya last week, and we showed it to some nurses who had never been trained in ultrasound. And it was amazing. So I was traveling with a male colleague and we made him lay down so they could scan him.
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And within about, I don't know, two minutes or so, they were identifying things inside of him. And then someone said, go get a pregnant woman, go get a pregnant woman. So they went outside and dragged in a pregnant woman and started scanning her. And they'd had no training in ultrasound whatsoever.
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So my students, you know, they worked really hard and they came up with this. And then they did this crazy thing. So they actually talked to the midwives out in the field who would be using a device like this to find out what they needed, did a bunch of tests. They also looked at that general context of care. Because again, they didn't know the domains of the problem space. They were complete non-experts at this.
26:00
And then they got really crazy and they actually talked to mothers. And they asked them about their preconceptions about ultrasound, any concerns that they may have, thinking about how the design of the system might address that. And they had them do all kinds of design activities to figure out the ecology of care decisions. So the very simple user interface
26:20
is one of the things that they came up with. The other component that they developed was a help system. So in a traditional ultrasound machine, a commercial machine, if you click on help, you'll get something that's a little bit akin to an old Windows help. So it'll give you some sort of useless
26:40
technical information about the system. And so after having done this work and also paying attention to the way radiology and imaging works in a more resource-rich hospital, and getting an understanding that when doctors order imaging, that's a collaborative process from the person who captures the image
27:01
and the doctor who interprets it. Contrasting that then with the way the midwives in Uganda were working, where they were working in rural environments. They were usually the only midwife on staff because there would be two, but they would work 12-hour shifts, so they would switch off. There's no internet and there is some spotty cell connectivity. So there was sort of no access to resources. So they thought, well, why don't we also turn
27:22
the ultrasound machine into a learning device, because they didn't know that you weren't supposed to do that. So they created this robust help system that has a lot of information in it. So you can sort of read about certain conditions. There's a button there, step-by-step. You can get instructions on how to capture
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certain kinds of images. You can also listen. If you don't wanna do all the reading, you can listen to the information there. And there's an image library, so you can compare. This is what you're capturing. This is what you're looking for until you get the right kind of image. And you can see the sliders there on the right.
28:00
Those sliders there, they replace, those together with the keyboard of the laptop, replace all of the buttons on that first machine that I showed you with all those arrows pointing to things. So in terms of these communities, thinking about the hackers in Uzbekistan or the hacker in Argentina or my students in Seattle,
28:22
they're all doing research, okay? And they're doing engineering. And it looks different because they have different constraints. And the different constraints are what allow them to be disruptive, to come up with technology that really is a game changer. So there are multiple research communities that produce innovations.
28:44
University and industry labs do a lot of really great things. I'm not saying that they don't. Then there's the relationship between or among universities, industry labs and independent researchers and that. Well, that relationship, it might look like that, but it might also look like that.
29:04
So it can also look like that. Actually, I don't really care what it looks like. What I care about is that the independent researchers are sort of out there and they have a different set of constraints. And they don't know better when they're not experts. And that means they can do things better in a lot of ways.
29:20
And they can come up with more original and more disruptive designs. There's lots of reasons why this kind of work is best done independently because it is disruptive. And as sort of we went through earlier with that Christiansen model, the disruptive work, it doesn't fit well in a lot of institutions. There are those real structural disincentives
29:42
to coming up with disruptive designs. So that's sort of a bunch of the stuff that's going into that book that I'm writing about disruptive technology and hackers. But then the second piece of that is trying to foster more open innovation. And so that's where this project Hackademia comes in,
30:00
which is predicated on openness. So open software, open hardware, as well as open communities. And so basically I wanna create the conditions for more of that rule breaking and more disruptive innovations. So there's a bunch of things that I've been doing along those lines.
30:20
So I've been looking at different kinds of open resources in communities. So things like contests and peer-based and crowd-sourced reputation systems that you see in the maker, as well as hacker worlds. Taking an educational focus on looking at what some of the workshops and contests that happen
30:44
within a conference like Def Con, for example. But also looking at some of the emerging educational examples like Khan Academy and Code Academy, Stanford University's online courses, MIT's OpenCourseWare, and looking at the way that technology is fostering the ability
31:00
of those non-expert communities to work on their own knowledge. So I've been looking at a combination of online and offline resources. So hacker spaces and maker spaces, I mentioned Khans and also Maker Fairs. And then also doing a lot of interviews with individual hackers and makers.
31:21
So that's, again, all extracting those patterns and sort of focusing in on some of the characteristics that seem to be really important for success. So community spaces, for example, and apprenticeship models, also reputation building events. Again, looking at characteristics and commonalities.
31:40
And so my goal is not replication, okay, but adaptation. So I, I mean, as I mentioned, I spent many years in my local hacker community, and there's no part of me that would say this can be replicated wholesale and brought into institutions and used productively.
32:00
But what I'm trying to do is identify those characteristics and then figure out how to adapt them to different settings. And ultimately, the reason why is because I think that more rule breakers will make the world a better place. And so that photo actually is, you go back to sort of that very first picture that I showed with the snow, one of the first projects
32:22
that I did with that hacker community was a balloon launch. And so that's a picture from our successful balloon that went really high up. So this thing that I'm running, this hackademia, sort of my role or my goal is to create pathways to innovations by creating pathways for people to gain functional engineering skills.
32:41
I don't care whether they're accredited. I don't want to turn everyone into an engineering major in this sort of semi-formal learning environment. We collaborate with our local hackers and makers. And I'm really, really interested in how non-technical adults acquire their technical skills. So if you haven't already been tracked into that. So this isn't just in the university,
33:01
but it's also thinking about the community outside and getting away from the limiting problem of self-selection. So casting a broader net, trying to draw in people who wouldn't find themselves in a hacker space under normal conditions, but who still have something to contribute. You do need to give people basic skills.
33:21
You need to have some knowledge so that you can have that different perspective and potentially innovate. A shared vocabulary is really important. So for me, I see hackademia as about creating potential. The students may never do anything as long as I know them, but hopefully five years down the road, they'll have been positioned to be potentially awesome innovators
33:41
and make some great contributions. We have a bunch of specific educational methods and approaches, which I'm not gonna go into here, but basically the key is how do you provide enough foundational knowledge so that people can read or tinker or experiment their way to functional engineering expertise.
34:01
And so you're gonna hear in just a couple minutes about the open innovation challenges. And so what I would say is think about something that you're not necessarily an expert in, but figure out how to have conversation with those who are experts in the domain that's necessary to execute well in those challenges. So that's my lab, you don't have to be an expert,
34:21
you don't have to be an innovator. And so I had mentioned at the beginning of the talk that there were three things. There's the book and then this hackademia project and then a third. And so indeed, no one knows what tomorrow brings. And so the book isn't done. And honestly, I'm not sure when it will be done
34:42
because what happened was I got sort of halfway through it and I thought, well, writing about innovation is really great but I'd really rather just do it. So I started a company. So I started a company with a bunch of hackers. It's an engineering and manufacturing company. And what we're doing is we're building low cost
35:02
health technologies for low resource regions. And that vice president that I told you about about 10 minutes ago who said, oh no, we could build cheaper technology but it wouldn't support the cost of our sales force. He was my inspiration because I do think that model is broken. So we really, we wanna figure out
35:21
how to make low cost technologies and sell them everywhere, bring down the cost of healthcare. And one of our primary kind of ethos is working with hackers rather than traditionally trained engineers because we want creative solutions to those entrenched problems. I will say that one of my co-founders
35:41
does have a PhD in EE and bioengineering but I didn't know that. I met her through the hacker community so I still consider her a hacker. And everything we do is predicated on open hardware. So it's based on all the openness that I've talked about here today and the fact that with open hardware
36:01
you don't need specialized EE knowledge to build things. It's amazing what you can do with technology remix. And so we're trying to put that into work. So, and we're doing a round. So if you're interested, you can come talk to me. And I have lots of acknowledgements there because that's part of what we do.
36:23
Lots of people have helped over the years. There's acknowledgements to all of them and thanks to all of you for your attention.
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