In 2012 I co-founded a company called Shift Labs.
We're a for-profit company dedicated to making low-cost, beautifully designed products for challenging environments. We build devices that make people's lives better.
You can learn more at www.shiftlabs.com.
I started Shift Labs as a response to difficulties I experienced in my lab and that I saw colleagues acorss multiple universities struggling with as well: really great ideas that could help make the world a better place never made it into the market because they fell into the "low cost" category. Shift Labs is built on the premise that non-experts as well as experts make great contributions to innovation (see my talks on the subject), and that a global innovation community tied to the hackerspace and makerspace movement can be leveraged to bring ideas to life and into people's hands if we can create product development processes targeted for the engineering challenges of low resource environments.
I love to hear from people with thoughts on what we're doing with Shift, ideas for how we can do it better, and passion for enacting similar kinds of change. Want to join us?