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Eric von Hippel (MIT)
June 7, 2017 @ 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Free Innovation
Free innovation is a grassroots innovation process in which self-rewarded household sector innovators develop and give away valuable product innovations “for free.” As an example, consider the father of a child with Type 1 diabetes who worried that he couldn’t check his son’s blood sugar levels when they were apart. A software engineer by profession, in his off-hours he “hacked” his son’s continuous glucose monitor so its data uploaded onto the Internet. Another engineer with a diabetic child used his spare time to create a home-display system for glucose monitor data. The two fathers combined their systems and made the design information freely available to others.