This is an excellent example of crowdsourcing linked to frugal innovation. It would have been called 'string and sealing wax' in the Cavendish Laboratory of the 1930s where brilliant minds made do with limited resources to achieve worldbeating insights.
The Constellation budget at NASA was cut by 45% in 2005. Wishing to find a solution to the problem of predicting particle storms, NASA used open access platforms to invite contributions from the public. The answer was provided by a semi-retired engineer from New Hampshire.
This may be a brash example, but it demonstrates that widening access to problems may unearth a potential solution. Now frugality has become an industry: leading to confusion between genuine savings and a developmental bandwagon.
Innovation in emerging nations where simplicity, reduced costs and imaginative re-engineering or design, manufacturing and sales has decreased the price of products taken for granted in the West. Especially in medical devices and healthcare, innovation may soon provide the strongest challenge to state financed healthcare monopolies.
Just imagine, frugal innovation may counter the crisis of welfare statism in the West, providing for a slimmer state and better living standards. The free market again disrupts potential monopolies that have dragged down these countries.
